Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Teaching math with Lego

As a parent engineer, my greatest fear is that my children will not like math too much. I'm not afraid that they will have problem with math at all, I believe I will be able to teach them how to handle numbers, logic and data properly. I'm just afraid that they will not see that math is beautiful and is universal tool to handle many and many day to day problems. But maybe I'm just overreacting as a young parent? Despite this, I'm still thinking about todays education, especially in STEM fields, and I decided to share my journey with you since beginning.

One of my first ideas was to use Lego bricks. So we waited till my daughter's first birthday and we gave her bucket with Lego bricks. She was aware of that gift, she played a little and then she started to ignore bricks and play with little drum. OK, no problem with that from my point of view :). We tried to play with that set couple times more on following days, and she was low to mildly interested. Sure, why not. Then we put this set in corner of her "playground" and basically forget about it.

And then suddenly, we accidentally started to play with those bricks again, and my daughter was sucked immediately. He loved to play with them, and to be honest, I and my wife were pretty surprised. What was the cause of it, what changed? Answer was simple, my daughter was older. She was 1,5 year old give or take few days. and that was exact number as entry age for this set. I thought "Whoa, this is really working!" and imminently started to looking for more math set. After checking Lego catalog I found perfect set for young STEM adept: My First Number Train Building Set 10558. This set contains 31 parts and was released in 2013.

10558 - Number Train
Why I consider this as a god STEM starter set? Well, it has numbers ;). There are 10 bricks with numbers from 1 to 10 on them. There are also 4 train/car platforms which can be connected into one locomotive and three wagons trains. There are also parts which build nice locomotive with movable roof. In addition there is one boy minifigure and dog figure.

What are my observations about it? I think that numbers are fine, but there is lack of proportion which can teach order of them. Of course they are simple, big, easy to handle bricks, so I guess that was a trade. Apart of that I think that building cars, trains, connecting wagons works great. I can honestly recommend that set as one of first sets of Lego you can buy to your kid.

If you like my blog you can consider buying this set through my Amazon Associates link.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Book review: Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation

Making Makers
Some time ago I bought Humble Maker Book Bundle which was containing 16 books from Maker Media. This Bundle, was dedicated to e-books containing many materials related to maker movement - a true and lasting DIY community.

Every book in this bundle is extremely interesting so I got hard time to decide what to read first. Since my daughter was to young (2 years old), and I was too busy to actually make anything I decided to start with Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation.

Making Makers is book in which author tries to guess and verify what are the ingredients which are building maker. AnnMarie Thomas apart from referring to her own past and experiences, is interviewing or mentioning about thirty other experienced makers. And this works great. She shows that in most cases, access to high tech gadgets and tools was not crucial. The most important factor was to find fun during doing stuff. And how to find fun? She mentions that sometimes it was while creating something new and unique. Sometimes it was during repairing something considered permanently broken. And sometimes fun and excitement emerged during disassembling something to see how it is working.

I like this book very much. It is written in very light and optimistic tone. And conclusions from this book are also very encouraging - you don't have to buy expensive 3d printer, tons of microcontrollers, tablets and similar stuff. You just have to take care of safety, encourage to experiment, show how are you doing cool stuff and motivate when there is lack of persistence. All of that in optimistic approach of course.

I would totally recommend this book to parents who want to engage their kids in creative activities, but are totally confused by today's toys industry. After this book you will find that sometimes such simple activity as sewing a missing button could totally change perspective.
If you like my blog you can consider buying this book through my Amazon Associates link.