Recently, some of
the people where I work have started a weekly writing prompt in order
to get people to blog more often. This week's topic is “How do we
involve the next generation of young minds?” and was inspired by
two of my co-workers building quadcopters with a group of students in
the northern part of the state.
This is a very
open topic and very difficult to cover in a way that is less wordy
than a copy or War and Peace (or at least your average work by
Stephen King). However, I think it can be approached by breaking it
down into a number of subjects which need to be addressed.
That being said,
let's begin.
Start Them Early
The truth is that
the earlier you start to instill curiosity and creativity in people,
the easier it is to get them to continue on that path. There are a
number of ways to do this, but if you're looking for ways to get a
small child started,
Legos,
Lincoln Logs,
Tinker Toys, etc are really
a wonderful way to get the ball rolling. They offer nearly endless
ways to combine pieces creatively, are tactile (which helps a lot of
people, children or not. Never underestimate the value of physically
building and handling something), and are generally fairly
affordable.
Realize that not
everything has to involve circuitry and code. Even things like basic
woodworking projects can help instill creativity and the engineering
mindset. I've built everything from birdhouses and toolboxes to
actual buildings while I was growing up and I learned something
valuable from every project.
As they get a
little older, introduce them to things like
crystal radio kits,
130-in-1 experiments kits (yes, they still make those),
snap circuits and even
simple programming languages like
Scratch and
Logo. A little later
still get them involved in writing code on something like a
RaspberryPi (it's fairly inexpensive and if you somehow manage to botch the
os, just re-flash the SD card and start over. You can even extend it in order to interact with hardware).
Tangoes are also a wonderful, inexpensive tool for teaching spatially related problem solving.
You want things
that are simple to get a beginner's grasp of yet versatile enough to
keep their attention after they master the basics and, most
importantly, make them want to learn even more.
Mindset
“A mind all
logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses
it.”
- Rabindranath Tagore
Logic is a very
important part of being successful in technology fields. However,
there is another part of the equation that is often overlooked –
creativity. You really do need both the ability to think your way
through a problem as well as the ability to look at a problem from a
completely different angle than other people at times.
We need to foster
not only logical thought, but also appreciation of and involvement in
the arts. I would almost argue that the type of
art doesn't matter nearly as much as being involved. Painting,
drawing, writing, music, theater, and countless others – all of
these things exercise your brain in ways that simple logic based
problem solving doesn't.
On
the logical side, we need to encourage the next generation of
technical people to cultivate the skills to look at situations
objectively, come up with a set of possible answers, and then
evaluate or work through them (revising their general assumptions as
they uncover more information) until they reach a conclusion. This is
the time for measured experimentation instead of just wildly poking
at a problem until something happens (though, admittedly, sometimes
poking at the problem is necessary in order to uncover behavior).
Encourage
the next generation to ask questions. That's not to say that you
should spoon feed them the answers since guiding them through the
discovery process is both an extremely effective way of teaching and
often fun for everyone involved. However you do it, you should
encourage them to ask the “whys” and “what ifs”.
Continuing
in the vein of asking questions, foster the questioning of authority.
If someone says “You can't do that” they should ask WHY.
If it's because doing that thing is dangerous, that's one thing. If
it's just because they don't think it can be done or because of other
foolish reasons (“getting above your station”, “that's not
something that proper girls/boys do”, etc), they should be
encouraged to CHALLENGE
IT.
We
are, among other things, professional troublemakers. We create and
change current reality as a part of our jobs. It's what we do.
Innovation is inherently disruptive. Embrace that; don't try to stomp
it out of the next generation.
Encourage
reading. I can't stress this enough. Fiction, non fiction, philosophy
– just read. It exposes you to different voices and approaches from
your own. It's literally a different view on the world, and being
exposed to that will help you grow.
Quick
Feedback, Small Victories
Make
initial victories easy to attain. This is especially true for younger
children. Defeat is frequently demoralizing. Starting off with a
victory encourages people to continue. It doesn't matter if it's just
making a ball bounce on the screen. Give them something that provides
near instant feedback that they
have done something with
a real, visible
result.
As
they progress, keep feedback loops tight even though the difficulty
of what they are doing increases with time. Yes, I realize that this
sounds a lot like Agile practices.
Make
it Safe to Fail
“I have not
failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
-
Thomas A. Edison
Failure, both
professionally and personally, is an occasional fact of life. No
matter what we try or how hard we work, there are times when things
just won't happen the way we want them to.
The problem is
that we have stigmatized failure to such a degree in this society
that some people are afraid to even try
because they might fail. This needs to stop.
Teach
people that it's okay to fail on occasion. That's not to say that we
should excuse laziness, but re-enforce the idea that failure
occasionally happens, treat it as a learning experience, and teach
others not to fear making a mistake.
Access to Tools
It may not occur to a lot of us in this
field that not everyone is as well off as we are from an economic
standpoint. Not everyone has ready access to the equipment needed to
learn various technical skills. This is especially true in both
poorer urban and rural areas.
Access to programing tools (IDEs, etc)
has become considerably cheaper thanks to open source tools and
educational/community licenses offered by companies like JetBrains
and Microsoft. However, for some people, computers are still an
expense that they can't justify (even if they are much cheaper than
when I started learning to program).
That's not to mention the expense of
things like quadcopter kits. Some of the things that you need access
to for some projects are simply out of reach for a number of individuals as well as
some school districts without outside help.
Access to Mentors
When I started
out, I didn't have any mentors to help me learn how to code. The
internet wasn't an option (yes, dinosaurs roamed the Earth and we had
to walk to school uphill both ways). I had never even met or spoken
to a professional software developer until I was in college. In fact,
the only other people I knew who wrote code were a few friends in
basically the same situation as myself.
It would have been
much easier and a lot less discouraging if I had had access to
mentors (even online) instead of having my only resources when I
started out be the manual for a
TRS-80 color computer and the
occasional code sample in magazines borrowed from our very small
public library (I
told you that dinosaurs roamed the
Earth at the time).
If you want to
encourage the growth of a new generation of creative and technical
people, you have to literally be there to encourage and guide them.
Answer questions on the internet, make yourself available to
schools/after school clubs and programs, and generally be a good
community member.
Parental Involvement
This is the really
difficult one. In order to encourage young people to go into
technology based careers, their parents have to be positively
involved. They can't just treat the computer as a way to babysit
their child or, possibly even worse, view everything that their child
does, no matter what it is, as simply “playing on the computer”
like my parents did (which, I might add, included programming
homework in college).
Keeping up
momentum when it feels like nobody cares or you are being actively
discouraged is extremely difficult. Not everyone is as hard headed as
I am.
Parents don't even
have to be experts in the field. They just have to be positive
influences. Be curious about what your child is doing, encourage
them, have them show off what they're doing to you a bit. Be a
cheerleader. It's important.
Show Me The Money
Show people that
there is a (generally) fun, well paying job doing work in this field
and that it doesn't matter if they're a girl or a boy or even what
socio-economic background they come from as long as they work at it.
After all, it's important to be able to do things like pay your
bills, go on vacation, and buy sandwiches.
As I said, this is
by no means an easy problem, and this is only the short list of
things that can be done to help, but it's a start and even if you can
only manage a few of them that's better than the alternative.
Current mood: calm
Current music:
Murray Head – One Night in Bangkok
