Every now and again someone asks for advice on educational toys, projects or activities for their kids. For a number of reasons I'm precisely the wrong person to recommend this or that. It's not that I don't care .. I worry a lot about kids who enjoy math and science until they're 11 or 13 and then suddenly it becomes hard and boring. This seems to happen to girls more than boys, which is just wrong. Too many programs focus on the top ten percent and too few on those who could use a different way of seeing things. I'm not terribly interested in the number of STEM graduates from college. Rather, it's far more important having a literate society.
There are a few excellent motivators on YouTube. Physics Girl is great, but her level is high school and beyond. For preteen and teenage girls (and many others) Simone Giertz is great. She's a bit nutty, hyper-enthusiastic and has built a good business inventing useless things. (She's also Swedish. I defy you to find that in her accent.) Many of her projects are too advanced for a 13 year old to recreate, but the basics are there and recreating them isn't the point. She wants to make you think about mechanical things differently. She fires imagination with her humor. Finally a huge bonus is that she admits to and highlights her mistakes.
Here's her latest - musical bubblewrap
Comments