How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age
wsj.com
wsj.com
I remember taking apart old radios as a child in the 70s, marvelling at the colourful transistors and resistors. But I had no way of knowing what exactly these were, and even less of a clue as to how it all worked. So sure, it's hard to intuit how a smartphone or a computer works just by looking at the insides. But today's budding scientists have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, and will be able to find diagrams and schematics for a lot of devices, and a large number of sites explaining what every component is and how it works. You don't raise scientists, you give them interesting toys to play with, and they simply raise themselves.
Nowadays the complexity is hidden under a smooth patch of black plastic that can have smart phone levels of complexity internally and no hint at the that from the outside.
Obviously it's swings and roundabouts since you can indeed find a wealth of information online about any of these subjects but sometimes it feels like it's harder to kindle the initial fire of curiosity.
I learned programming from messing around with the online game Roblox, which is essentially a game engine with Lua scripting support. I played lots of games, wanted to learn how to make the same thing myself, and discovered the wonderful world of programming. A majority of the programmers I am friends with I met through Roblox, and have been friends with ever since, and all of them got into programming the same way.
I don't think most people appreciate how much kids want to not only emulate people in their lives, but also build things in their lives. I love that its so easy to google help for making things. Want to make a longboard or a full-size R2D2 model? There's so much documentation out there. If anything, we're in the golden age of DIY and things like videogames and other "distractions" are actually motivators for creative kids.
I just recently graduated and picked up the new xbox since I have some free time now. I ran into an issue playing Halo 5 where I kept getting disconnected from the game, and it turns out it is a bug in the networking software in combination with the "instant on" feature that was causing it. My networks class gave me a decent enough background where I can actually understand the bug is. I thought that was pretty cool!
It was through this that I learned how to program. While I did spend some time with python and other languages, programming in a video game was far, far more fun, and thus I spent hours doing it.
Due to it, today I have a great job, and in my spare time, I make my own games.
Basically "I want to make a badass action game" eventually turned into "I want to make a badass graph-traversal algorithm"
- let kids have free time, instead of structuring their every waking minute
- give kids lots of unsupervised computer time - you can't do anything but play stupid games if you only have strict time limits, but if they are not worried about using up their weekly allowance, they may start doing some creative stuff (including discovering programming)
- don't mind kids learning how to break stuff, or literally blow shit up - maybe even encourage them; that especially includes pyrotechnics
- let them read the book past midnight
- don't obsess too much about grades
- realize that doing science often literally looks like being less social than peers and involves not going out to play football every evening
And above all,
- be patient
Time will tell though... I know I wasted a lot of time as a kid, but that was pre-internet, I had to read books to learn things.
BTW. I personally wouldn't discount even the educational value of stupid YouTube videos. Kids pull a lot more out of media than adults do. We see just a funny clip, but for a kid it's a way to learn a new language, learn new phrases of the native language, learn some culture, etc.
My journey in the past decade has roughly been "stupid shit", "how does that stupid shit work?", "why am I consuming the stupid shit when my peers are clearly capable of creating it?"
The biggest leap was realizing that it was _my peers_ creating much of this, so it was feasible for me to do the same!
It would be fascinating to have a study of current 25-35 year olds occupations and parenting rules. Perhaps it's been done? (a few rules that could be asked about "limited screen time", punishment (e.g. spanking, timeout), being sent "outside", etc...).
Simply put, I think as a parent of four children that active avoidance of time-wasting activities is helpful for children's development. Children need time for thinking and daydreaming and reverie, but too much entertainment can take time away from those valuable activities. Richard Rusczyk, a founder of the Art of Problem Solving Foundation, comments that if video games were commonplace during his childhood, he probably would not have learned as much about problem-solving as he did while growing up. Part of a parent's job is making sure that children don't gorge themselves on candy or on nondevelopmental personal activities. Those things need to be experienced in moderation.
P.S. I recently worked as a math teacher in a private middle school. Don't even get me started on pervasive use of iPads in school classrooms.
Well put. I often see these posts saying "TV is bad", "Computers are bad", "Tablets are bad" for kids, but not often the sentiment driving it.... Tuning in and turning off is the bad part, it's just infinitely more boring if you try to do it after being sent outside.
Going shopping later today.
They will do what they see you doing, up to a certain age.
I have a sheet of paper from daycare, pride of place in my office, that reads "What do you want to learn this year? I want to learn about making projects"
It never fails to warm my heart
This article reflects some of my own views. I moderate my kids' access time to electronic games very tightly. We have frequent group discussions on things we've seen, done, learned, etc. The conversations are really amazing and are a good lead-in to bedtime.
It shouldn't surprise me, but I often hear more intelligent conversation from my kids than I do from most media sources. In fact, we sometimes analyse places like The Verge for their prejudice as an exercise in critical thinking around flawed arguments and fallacies. We look at youtube for history, engineering and biology videos. We've developed board games, Rube Goldberg machines, flying craft, gone on bike hikes, looked at water safety...
If you live in the suburbs and you look in your local area, there are many free educational community activities too. We've looked at construction, robotics, software and sports activities to name a few.
We even make up our own learning activities. Eg. we went shopping together and discussed food priorities, food costs for equivalent items, set a budget, discussed buying local v/s imported food, etc.
There are learning opportunities all around. I feel that education on computers is over-rated and critical thinking outside of a computer is underrated. It just takes a lot of time and energy. I usually put in a weekend of planning about a month before school holidays.
Isn't it what we called "basic arithmetics" back in the day? :).
I'm pretty sure you could find variants of this scrawled into a cave wall in the cradle of civilization if you looked hard enough.
I've always had a little pet theory that boredom is actually a major driver behind a lot of innovations, and doesn't just matter in children.
The easy fix is gaming, it's like junk food for boredom hunger. Take away the junk food and you get reading/tinkering/creative play etc etc.
There is, on the other hand, one "easy fix" that most kids end up taking - it is spending time with people. Hanging out. It's an infinite time sink. You can get bored or tired with a video game, but other people are the best at inventing something new to do or experience. Except if all the kids do is hanging out with each other, they aren't exactly learning much.
So I guess it depends on who you want your kid to become. If you're aiming for a "people person", then by all means, cut out computer time. But if you want an engineer, I'd personally stick with video games.
That sounds like a driver of innovation too! Maybe the real issue is that kids should be taught motivational skills to make hanging out "productive".
If you were to read the the autobiography of many of today's top scientists like E.O. Wilson [0], they explicitly say that they wouldn't be accepted into hard science program today with a childhood spent collecting bugs.
So the "scary" part of little Johnny going through an Xbox phase for a few years is that even if he comes out the other side curious about the natural world, little Suzy has already entered the Intel Science Fair, made connections at a research university, etc.
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Scientist-Edward-Wilson/...
I couldn't afford a computer, but I wanted one badly. I learned used Xboxes ($100) could run Linux with some elbow grease.
So I put together every dime I had and bought one. A week later the hard drive died, so I had to learn to replace that (found an e-waste spindle, learned to hack the Xbox to accept unlocked drives). And it turns out the VGA adapter had to be hand-made with parts from DigiKey. Then old corroded traces started failing. Debacle after debacle, I killed that thing and resurrected it, again and again.
Viola, I began to learn tremendous amounts about things that had before been utter black boxes. Probably the single biggest impetuous to me working in technology.
And yeah, I still play video games. And I'm a scientist. Actually, video games probably helped develop my scientific mind. I wish video games wouldn't be equivalent to drivel in the eyes of casual observers. There is so much more to gaming.
But, how do we produce scientists? By fostering open minded curiosity and its cousin, wonder, then introducing critical thought as a guide once the former two have been established firmly. The path of curiosity inevitably leads toward uncharted territory, and, instead of cautioning against the unknown for fear of failure, we should encourage the young to forge ahead-- this is something that most parents will not do, because the unknown is frightening. To raise a scientist, I assume it might also be helpful (but not ethical) to have a complex series of lies / unprovable or counterfactual stories to tell to the child as though they were truth, so that they may have practice in combating poor thought or ignorance, another critical task that scientists must perform at all times to the best of their ability.
In short: first cultivate a hunger for knowledge, and then a hunger for facts, and finally a hunger for truth.
> But I could have created a better chemistry set from the liquids in my own refrigerator.
I was a student in a mostly remote, freshman college science class. Other than our one week on campus, all of our chemistry "experiments" were done with things we had in our house or that could be bought at any corner store.
There are plenty of people who do this for a variety of reasons - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=at+home+chemistry&t=ffhp
(And since he seems to think that getting in trouble is important, I feel the need to point out that you can still get in trouble with chemicals found around the house - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleach#Chlorine-based_bleaches . Tangent, many years ago I had a friend who did not know this – until he landed in the ER after mixing way too many and varied household cleaners.)
> Assuming you can even figure out how to pry it open, the inside is as mysterious and inscrutable as the outside.
Not if you have a minimally knowledgeable mentor (i.e. knowledgeable enough to know how to lookup what you find online). If you have a kid and aren't able to be their knowledgeable mentor, you and your kid/s really should check out your closest makerspace/s.
>Yet how can we expect junior scientists to daydream, when they can be playing computer games instead?
Give them games with scientific content, e.g.
- http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/online_science/games.aspx
- http://www.onlinecolleges.net/50-great-sites-for-serious-edu...
In fact, there's an emerging field of education focused on Game-Based Learning:
- http://newmedia.org/game-based-learning--what-it-is-why-it-w...
- http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/games/index.html
And look, there's even some hyper-relevant research Becoming Chemists through Game-Based Inquiry Learning: The Case of "Legends of Alkhimia" - http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ985421 / http://www.ejel.org/issue/download.html?idArticle=188 that shows...
>Two evaluation criteria were used: (1) effectiveness of separation, and (2) demonstration of conceptual understanding of chemistry. We found that the Alkhimia students significantly outperformed the control students when assessed on the extent to which effective separation was achieved in the students' proposed solution (t75 = 2.56, p = 0.026) and when assessed with respect to conceptual understanding of chemistry in the separation task (t75 = 3.41, p = 0.002).