Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

She had no interest at all in learning how to code or gaming but she loved helping in the garden and in the kitchen prepping and cooking meals.

When she got to Jr. High she wanted to join the "Cheerleader" squad so there were a lot early morning rides to school I had to make, and lot's of Basketball games I attended until she graduated, but I had a lot fun cheering along with them.

During those years I setup a campsite on our property so her and her friends could go hang out there. I'm sure they had more fun than most parents would approve of but they never got into any real trouble, the police were never called, and no one got hurt bad enough for the parents to call me. For the most part all those parents knew exactly where their kids were and what they were doing. And that I was close enough to deal with anything that came up. But there were never any serious issues.

She's 37 years old now, still loves to hike, backpack, swim, fish, garden, and cook, and most important, she still likes to hang out with me!

I recommend starting with an RTLSDR ($30 on Amazon) and a homemade dipole. You can use an open source program called GQRX to listen to it. This will be fun to just listen to local FM radio, air traffic controllers, EMS/Police in your area if it’s not encrypted.

If she seems interested and you want to go a bit further, buy a block frequency upconverter (there’s one on Amazon called “ham it up” for ~$30) and make a large antenna for the 20M ham band. You’ll be able to pick up people from all over the country, and if you do a good job on the antenna, all over the world.

Most importantly, it’s fun and you get to work with your hands. You get to have fun trying to get ropes over trees in your yard to hang the antenna high enough. You get to deal with the problem of measuring out 60 feet of wire and cutting it. You have to figure out what trees to hang the antenna on so that it’s pointing where you want to listen (not directly East, but northeast due to the curvature of the earth, Google maps “measure distance” can help give a vector). This is all done with a cheap run of coax and speaker wire, no more than $40 in materials.

If she’s into it, you can get your ham radio technician license for a $15 fee, and you can get two way radios on Amazon for the VHF/UHF bands for $20 (baofeng UV5R). Fun to study for.

It’s possible the undergrad assumed you were referring to an efficient recursive algorithm or simply forgot most recursion.