Teaching my 6 year old son using Arduino
The world around us is changing rapidly these days. Our children are adapting better than us to this changing environment. My son is just 6 years old and he watches more YouTube than cable television. I am famous within my family for being a wiz kid myself but I would admit that I have learned a lot about using latest technology from him. I switched to YouTube in a big way after seeing him. He even unknowingly taught me a few shortcuts in iPad!
I had some interest in IoT (Internet of Things) and thus learned Arduino in a workshop that I attended last year in San Francisco. After coming back to India I kept my Arduino board in a drawer and forgot about it. I thought that I was too old to learn hardware development from scratch.
Arduino is a famous open source electronics hardware project. It’s popular around the world with hobbyists and gadget freaks. It can be used for creating various kinds of electronic gadgets.
Interestingly my son got hold of it this year and he was able to light up a LED using it. It motivated him so much that he stopped watching Doraemon cartoons on YouTube and TV and started exclusively watching Do It Yourself (DIY) videos showing the making of electronic toys.
Now an interesting thing happened. He was highly motivated to build Arduino based toys while his mother (my BIG BOSS — my wife) wanted him to do school related stuff. He did not want to study but wanted to do hardware and software development at this tender age!
I am a self taught programmer who wrote India’s first book on mobile app development in 2003 when I was just 22 years of age. I started learning serious programming from class 7th. I wanted to make a video game. I learned programming at that age to make video games.
So I could understand the mental state of my son. I wanted to find a solution to make both my son and my wife happy.
His mother and teacher wanted to teach him less than and greater than symbols. He was constantly doing them wrongly. Eureka! I found the answer to my problem using this simple Arduino program.
void setup()
{
pinMode(13 ,OUTPUT) ;
if(63 > 64)
{
digitalWrite(13, HIGH) ;
}
else
{
digitalWrite(13, LOW) ;
}
}
This is a very simple program to make an LED glow if 63 < 64. I actually gave him wrong symbols along with many combinations of numbers. When the program is run with wrong symbol the LED does not glow. LED glows only when someone puts the correct symbol and runs the program.
Interestingly, after this experiment, he completed all the number combinations with correct symbols in one go. He said to me that he thought Arduino is just for making toys while now he knew that it could also be used to study!
This small experiment tells us a lot about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) education and education in general. Children do not need to be taught STEM subjects. They just want FUN!
So if as a parent you want FUN just do these kinds of experiments with your children. They are great FUN for both children as well as parents. Education also happens as a by product!
We have shifted our blog to https://fun2dolabs.org
