How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age

Re:How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age by TeMPOraL on Thursday December 17, 2015 @01:09PM (#10753135)

I think the biggest obstacle to raising scientists and engineers is... parents. Especially if they are overcaucious and subscribe to the popular belief that technology is evil and kids should play football outside. Kids are naturally curious, and it takes effort to screw that up. Also, there are tried and true methods of increasing chances that a kid will grow up with interest in science and engineering. Unfortunately, they are very uncomfortable to the mainstream views. Some examples:

- 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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age by optimuspaul on Thursday December 17, 2015 @01:16PM (#10753194)

That's great advice until you realize that your kids are just spending all that computer time watching stupid YouTube videos and not actually learning anything at all except "What are those?"

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age by TeMPOraL on Thursday December 17, 2015 @01:30PM (#10753305)

You have to accept that kids will spend a lot of time doing stupid shit. That's the part of learning experience. But at some point there may come a moment when a kid starts to wonder how to make stupid shit like what they saw, and there is the opportunity for them to learn creative/technical stuff. But they won't get that chance with hard, strict limits - then there's only time to watch.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age by lfowles on Thursday December 17, 2015 @05:21PM (#10755021)

> But at some point there may come a moment when a kid starts to wonder how to make stupid shit like what they saw

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!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How to Raise a Scientist in the Xbox Age by HiLo on Thursday December 17, 2015 @01:12PM (#10753154)

I think this is generally great advice, not just for raising scientists.

[ Parent | on HN ]