One of the many joys I have being a mom is watching in amazement as my children figure things out around them. The children of this generation are sometimes termed "tech kids" because they are being raised in a digital era where technology is advancing rapidly. In developed countries, most of these children will never know what it is like to communicate without the internet, without cell phones, and without iPads or the like. My three-year-old can pick up an iPad, iPod, or iPhone and immediately begins pushing buttons and sliding screens to figure out where he wants to go. It's almost like a fluent non-verbal language. Cause and effect are running through his brain at enormous speeds, and it seems to only take one time to learn it. I want to say, "Wait! How did you do that?". When my middle son was in first grade, the first time he saw his teacher use the smart board he was able to get on the laptop and control the smart board. He could do presentations and artwork on it. When I recently got my first smart phone, my two oldest sons (ten and fourteen) decided I needed their advice on apps, which pictures I needed for my screensavers (they called them something else), and how to navigate away from pages and hide them so they did not drain my battery. There was so much they wanted to teach me and their brains were working so fast that they couldn't even get the words out fast enough. It was very fascinating.
In her
TEDTalk video entitled "What do babies think?", Alison Gopnik posits, "Children are the brilliant butterflies and adults are the caterpillars. Babies and children are the research and development of the human species and adults are the production and marketing. Adults have to take all the ideas we learned earlier and put them to good use". Children fly freely and take in everything around them and absorb it like a sponge. Adults tend to inch along later in life.
One example that comes to mind is my nephew, Zack. From a very early age he could see a car and give you the make, model, and sometimes the year. He loves to figure out how things work. He doesn't want to simply hear an awesome motor, he wants to open the hood and see how it works. He has always loved putting Legos together in many different ways to see how they work together. This research he has been doing over the past twelve years and continues to do will serve him well into the future when he possibly becomes a mechanical engineer. Since he was a toddler, our oldest son would be in a group with his playmates and we could watch the wheels turning in his brain. He might not say a lot, but he would eventually step in and facilitate the project at hand. Whether it was organizing how the playdoh went into the proper containers, how to sit in a circle for Duck, Duck, Goose, or how to glue the paper scraps on the paper to make a picture, he was organizing the project in his mind and helping the ones he thought were struggling (in other words, not doing it his way). Two summers ago he was accepted into the Bernard Harris Engineering Camp at the University of South Alabama. At twelve years old, it was beyond cool to live as a college student for two weeks on campus. On the day that Bernard Harris (a former NASA astronaut and his foundation sponsors the camp) was there, one of the projects was to build a mach panel for an astronaut's helmet that could best withstand meteoroids in space that can travel up to 8000 meters per second. The students were placed into teams and given a budget and list of materials they could use to engineer the panel. Bernard Harris then placed the completed panels in a machine that dropped a heavy metal stake into the panel to see if it withheld the force. I watched Cameron, my oldest son, quietly begin to lead the team and help facilitate the project. Hopefully his quiet and subtle leadership abilities will serve him well in his career.
Shilo Shiv Suleman is an Indian young lady with immeasurable creativity. She was illustrating children's books as a teenager. Shilo was originally terrified of technology and feared it would stifle creativity. She has since greatly embraced technology. In her
TEDTalk video entitled "Using tech to enable dreaming", she believes that "technology should enable magic, not kill it". I can see her as a toddler coloring her pictures that only make sense to her, then as a young child telling a story via pictures that others could recognize, and now she is optimally using technology to bring her stories to life and connect storytellers all over the world via iPad and other technologies. She is merging sounds, images, and interactive capabilities to enable people to embed themselves in her stories. It's amazing, and it all began with the imagination of a brilliant butterfly that could barely walk or talk.
Gopnik says, "A baby's brain is the most powerful computer on the planet. When children play they are actually doing a series of experiments". I love watching my youngest son play with his water table. He will put different things in the water like sand, grass, rocks, and leaves to see if they sink or float. He will see if they go down the swirly water tube in the middle. He will turn the water wheel fast and slow to determine how much or how little the water splashes. He will then get in his pool and attempt to mimic some of the same experiments. When children play baseball in the yard, it becomes various forms of the game. With a little dirt, some sticks, and little plastic soldiers, the backyard can become an enormous battleground complete with moats and forts. The battle lasts all day and ends up including several neighborhood kids. If this fort doesn't work, let's blow it up and build a better one. These children growing up in the digital era can now take this imagination back inside and recreate this world digitally and share it with other friends and include them in the project. The creative possibilities are endless.
"Babies and children have a lantern of consciousness instead of a spotlight of consciousness like adults. They are very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources" (Gopnik). This is why it is imperative to allow children to play and interact outside as well as inside where many children are glued to devices. This time of childhood is highly correlated to knowledge and learning. Children will be increasingly living and operating in a digital world, and interaction cannot become extinct. The more sources of knowledge they are exposed to open up a bigger space for learning. A great merging of the outside with technology is geocaching. Geocaching is a very creative way to explore your town and other places
you visit. It is where people with hide a "cache" that is then located
by others who are geocaching. There are literally millions of geocaches scattered
through more than 185 countries around the world. This is a wonderful activity for family time and to foster a child's creativity and application of technology. Geocachers use iPhone apps, GPS systems, mobile phones, and laptops to research and find caches. Gopnik likens a baby's capacity to constantly take in innumerable elements of knowledge to the feeling of falling in love in Paris after three double espressos. That gives adults a shaky feeling. It spurs babies on to learn a million more things in the next sixty seconds!
Let me know the brilliant things your children have done and are doing. It is exciting to take some time and pay attention! I'd love to hear from YOU!
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