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Teaching Fifth Graders Engineering
Jamie noticed a NYT story saying "To compete in a global economy, some school districts are offering engineering lessons to students in kindergarten. " The story is about 5th graders working on a new experimental curriculum that is well beyond the egg drop of old.
I remember the egg drop. We also built bridges out of popsicle sticks, and tested them to see which could hold the most weight. That was the most engineering related hands on project I think I had in all of elementary school.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
It's great that schools are doing this, but I think parents are the biggest factor. Parents have a strong influence on the toys kids get at an early age, and at that early age children can show an interest in almost anything.
Want your kids to grow up with a healthy respect for / interest in engineering? Buy them Lego, Meccano (aka Erector Sets), K'Nex, etc... any toy that lets them play in a sandbox with minimal limitations, and particularly any toy that allows the creation of functioning mechanisms
Supplement this with some old hardware that they can take apart with only a screwdriver (and do it with them if they're too young to do it safely).
Computers and programming languages are also a great place to start, especially since the sandbox they provide allows easy experimentation (if you made an error, things don't blow up -- you can always reset and try again). However programming is arguably something that's best for slightly older children, whereas taking apart old mechanical/electrical hardware can be enjoyed by many children even as early as age 5 or before.
Of course this won't necessarily result in an engineer -- after all a child's interests can be largely determined by their personality, their school, and their social environment. However, by setting the foundations with these types of toys, your kid will at least have an understanding of engineering, which can only be beneficial. The fundamental point, I think, is that you can't just rely on schools -- as a parent you have to lay the foundations for learning (of any field or subject) at home, by spending time with your child and guiding them towards productive fun activities (and no, using the TV as a babysitter all the time will not accomplish this goal).
I'm not a parent yet, so I guess I'll see how well I do in this area when the time comes... However I do know what my parents did, and I think it worked pretty well
Nothing really new here. "Primitive" societies have involved children in engineering -- boatbuilding, weapons tech, housing construction, medicine, agriculture -- for millenia.
5th graders, not 5 year olds
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
1) Work harder than almost any other branch of schooling 2) Work for free on the evenings and weekends 3) Do things that no one cares about or appreciates 4) Life-long learning never stops, what about life? 5) Employment opportunities fall drastically after 35, you're too old 6) Watch engineering melt down and get exported to cheaper countries 7) Fuck it, go to law school
8) Profit by bringing dubiously generic and obvious patent cases against those daft enough still to be producing something for a living and who won't be able to afford to defend themselves in court.
I did Anonymous Coward; it's unlikely they will start with the more complicated concepts in kindergarten
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
Obviously not something that would be done in school, but playing with firecrackers and other incendiary devices provided me with some engineering insights early on.
Sample objective: achieving maximum height of a projectile using an explosive propellant.
Lessons learned: 1) Use a seamless can (such as an empty butane canister), as normal cans would just blow apart. 2) Set canister in a basin of water to minimize energy loss, with firecracker suspended by the wick through a hole on top.
Results: A couple hundred meters altitude, incredibly low deviation from vertical.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
(Damnit, what is slashdot coming to?)
Anyways.... fifth graders are not in kindergarten (or at least, they damn well shouldn't be!)
At least the article was a lot less confusing by saying they are teaching it to levels from kindergarten through grade 5.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I like the overall idea, but I think they could introduce some "Mythbuster"-type experimentation. First it helps understand the "Hypothesis-Methodology-Test-Conclusion" scientific approach and it also encourages them to be critical of pre-conceived ideas.
In the old days, you went to university at what - 14? However, very few went there.
The "problem" with this is that modern schooling of the social-democratic form has emphasised equality and coherence - hence, the class largely progresses for the first 10 years, up until you can get some differentiation, at the learning speed of the moderate-to-slow student. This is a conscious choice. Not to intentionally "keep people stupid", but because childhood is seen by many as a period to mess around and have fun and learn a bit, and by others that if you separated people in classes by ability it would be a gargantuan step towards a formalised "class system".
I remember in 4th grade, when I finished my class mathematics book in 2 months. What did they give me to do? Page upon page upon page (an I mean literally, something like 5 per maths hour) of questions that were of an IDENTICAL DIFFICULTY so that we wouldn't "progress beyond the rest of the class". One other person in the class was the same (and later ended up at Microsoft, a brilliant programmer but a social wreck), and we would compete for the number of sheets of identical-level calculations we could go through per hour. Not to mention, this caused a level of boredom and anguish at times which was a bit like getting stabbed in the eye and suffering literally a brain implosion, but it was all both planned and justified by the 'egalitarianism' perspective. I believe the US is different from Europe in that you have at least some form of 'bright students classes', whilst this is extremely rare in Europe.
So it's a tradeoff and a decision to make. Will you separate out the brighest students, give them more attention and better tutoring, with the hopes that they do great things for your nation? Or won't you? There are a large number of people in the academic world arguing for either.
Many people consider design of a one-off prototype as engineering, but often real engineering means creating something that can be manufactured, or creating something that can be very reliable, or creating something that can be made cheaply. I have met many PhD's in engineering that only prefer to make a single working prototype just like they did to get their "engineering" PhD. Sure, the technology is cool, but if the target application requires more than one, what good is it?
A particularly effective LEGO League coach, when handed a robot by erstwhile middle schoolers, proceeded to pull the robot horizonally. If it came apart, he handed the 'bot back to the team with two words: "Horizontal stresses."
If it held together, he nodded, then pulled the robot up and down. If it came apart, he handed the 'bot back to the team with two words: "Vertical stresses."
If the robot could handle stress, he asked to see what it could do on the scoring table.
He also made sure that there were cookies, sometimes, and drinks.
Good times, those.
It's CmdrTaco's commentary that is wrong, the summary and grandparent is correct.
From the article:
To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs — and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.
The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.
When people consider the kids ready for religion at kindergarten age, I don't see why they shouldn't be ready for science.
My observations show enviro cliches are more popular now. The more guilt inducingly politically correct the better. If the hypothesis / test / conclusion steps are a bit weak, well, we'll give credit anyway because its so important. That's what I've been seeing.
Besides, someone could get hurt/maimed/killed/sued from doing anything, so its better to just make a poster on the topic of enviro original sin.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Fifth graders are far too soft and slippy to make anything useful out of.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All tertiary sector jobs, and all of them go away, eventually, after the primary and secondary sector go away. So, since we've destroyed the primary and secondary sectors, tertiary should be going away shortly.
Law is not so healthy, no way for recent grads to be hired or pay off their loans. A dying industry.
Medicine will collapse once no one can afford it anymore. We are in in that process, right now.
Exec management is a great solution for approx 0.001% of the population, the other 99.999% can starve, I guess.
Investment banking probably mortally wounded over the last couple years. Only makes financial sense when the net population is pouring money into the stock market via retirement funds... and once the baby boomers retire and start a net pull out of the market, then a decades long bear market and a drought of IPOs is inevitable.
Mismanagement/consulting, well, dead primary and secondary companies don't need managers or consultants, and soon dead tertiary companies won't either.
Entertainment/sports, again a great solution for approx 0.001% of the population, the other 99.999% can starve.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_sector_of_the_economy
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Engineers don't work in factories, troll...
People who work in factories are mostly drones or technicians at best (with an occasional engineer to...
I don't think you wrote what you meant. Let me edit it for you: "Engineers don't work in factories, except for when they do. Thankyou very much for your input to the discussion, here ends my respectful reply."
This is where BP's ideas are coming from
One requires complex thought that people don't develop till they are about 12 and the other one just requires people to be dogmatic about something.
Yeah exactly. What's even worse is this kind of nonsense is starting to infect mathematics as well! Math classes are filled with tired old cliches like calculating the sides of a triangle or the area of a circle, or learning algrebra. I say get these kids started coming up with a prove for the Riemann hypothesis, then let them go from there.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Ask a 5 year old about dogma and they with respond by asking for a puppy.
My Dad had a sign on his desk that said, "Siks munths ago I coodnt even spel injuneer. Now I are one."
. There was a write up in the local paper and lots of enthusiasm. I would say that the goals of the program were not so much education as...
It was a lot of fun and well received. The next batch of sessions will cover:
.
So far it has not been too hard to avoid the conversation becoming religious, thankfully it has not become a big issue. I think the after school nature of the program and the fact that it covers things that are outside the curriculum releases a lot of pressure. I had intended that the presenters "aim high" with the subject matter and leave the kids that are interested to use their own initiative to find out more; and there is plenty of evidence that this is happening based on reports of classroom discussions and students telling me about the scratch programs they have created. It really is not an intent to directly teach anything, but I have come to believe that there are many subjects that seem unsuitable (such as relativity) but in fact are more hard to believe than hard to understand. I have also come to believe that the single biggest barrier to the schools working well is lack of parental involvement. Getting some parents to come to the school and join in any event is a huge undertaking and I think is the biggest potential benefit of a program like this.
Perhaps we should just get the PTA to open a bar at the school
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Nullius in verba
This is a sad post, and even sadder that it was marked Insightful.
Yes, there are downsides to engineering, as there is in any industry (although engineers typically only see their own). However, please give me a good problem to solve, and a bunch of smart people to solve it with, over anything that some of the other majors involve. I love solving problems and getting things (software in my case) to work together. Some of my best college memories were the nights my friends and I would stay up and work on a difficult programming problem and achieve a great deal of satisfaction in doing so.
Yeah, there is the money issue (although, there are a number of engineers who have gone on to make a great deal of money), but, as Forrest Gump's mama said, "There is only so much money a man needs, and the rest is for showing off." At some point, you have to decide what is really most important to you and what it is that you enjoy doing.