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

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

#161

Post by svnt »

kwatsonafter wrote: post #157

In training academic Pedagogist here: It may be worthwhile to take a two or day three reading of Rousseau's classic, "Emile; or On Education." It gives tremendous insight into how it is that adults can have positive relationships with the children that they might be governing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile%2C_or_On_Education Rousseau recommends: Night games, obstacle courses, Natural Method (Parkour), but in sh…

If you’re going this route there is a whole field of early childhood development; don’t read one archaic text and declare “this is the way” or you risk coming off like the new grad student in Good Will Hunting. [0]

Montessori (the person) and Steiner are other interesting originating sources in Western culture but reading about how the e.g. Aka parent might be a shorter path. [1]

[ 0 https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/specialengage... ]

[ 1 Review Barry and Bonnie Hewlett’s research particularly]

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

#162

Post by tmaly »

I can think of three great options for age 11.

First option get a makeymakey and work through the free project videos on their site.

Second option get a microbit and work through the free tutorials on makecode. If you have two microbits, they can talk via onboard radio. They also have Bluetooth so you can connect to a phone.

Third get a copy of the Getting Started in Electronics RadioShak book and build some of the science and circuit projects.

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

#164

Post by brailsafe »

dhosek wrote: post #132
thendrill wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised how much more relevant info programmers miss... Example, most programmers I know have no idea when a variable gets allocated on the stack and when it's on the heap. Let's not talk about how many dont even know what a (stack overflow)[ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow ] is...

I remember being shocked to discover that a recent CS grad could not implement a factorial function using recursion. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do that, but to not be able to do it?

Heh, I just did the DS+A section of a Faang interview, and got the time and space complexity of an optimal solution more or less correct, as well as most of a recursive binary search implementation, but not quite there. I stumble with recursion because syntactically it's something you either have to use a lot or deliberately practice to have a keen sense of return values imo.

Probably won't get an offer because of that. Do I feel like as a frontend engineer I really need that knowledge? Not really. I could work it out for work purposes if I needed to tho. I'd be practicing it just to pass interviews.

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

#165

Post by brailsafe »

groffee wrote: post #118
brailsafe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

That's not something you should be so quick to tell people.

Heh, roasted. I know you're being a bit facetious, but it's not like I haven't used them, but in terms of the acronyms and maybe actually using them as bitwise operations, it's something I've rarely needed in JS programming. If you aren't being facetious, then you might need to work on humility

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

#166

Post by brailsafe »

ch4s3 wrote: post #120
groffee wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not something you should be so quick to tell people.

Oh come on! There are a lot of types of programming and most of them exist pretty far from logic gates. The previous poster probably understands the concepts from their work but doesn’t relate them to logic gates.

Ya that's basically what I meant. The concepts are arguably unavoidable if you've done enough.

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

#167

Post by abrax3141 »

credit_guy wrote: post #76

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft. Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder. On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" yo…

Redstone is fun, and some people do amazing builds with it, but it gets tedious fast; like building your own computer from transistors - fun … once! :-) But Minecraft has an incredible amount of richness once you get into modding and command blocks (although it’s a shame that they don’t have a proper lua built in.) Speaking of which, there’s powder toy, which DOES have built in Lua.

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

#168

Post by cesaref »

It sounds like an amazing opportunity that you should grab. You both have the freedom to do something that normally would be closed to you due to constraints on both of your time (school and work).

Assuming you can afford it, how about hiring a camper van and taking off for a month, and see where you end up? There's bound to be places you both would love to see which otherwise would be difficult, and by being away from the trappings of home and email etc, you'll get some amazing quality time together which may not happen again.

11 is a great age, but you are at the start of some difficult years where there's lots of pressure on kids, both from society and from family (go well at school, know what you want to do etc etc). So take advantage of some care free time together!

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

#169

Post by HideousKojima »

nickysielicki wrote: post #146
oblib wrote: post #141

I became a single parent when my daughter turned 1 year old. When she got old enough we'd go fishing, bicycling, swimming, and hiking a lot. We'd also go to a used book store twice a month (on pay day) so she could pick out a few books to read. She loved doing that. 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…

We have such a weird culture around how we treat teenagers in this country. We all remember drinking and smoking as teens, but parents tends to rule with an iron fist and convince themselves that they have more control than their parents did, which means we force healthy normal curious kids to go out to a secluded area (probably by car) to get high or drunk or explore in other ways, away from an adult that could help…

>We all remember drinking and smoking as teens

Speak for yourself, worst thing I did in high school was play too many video games.

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

#170

Post by xattt »

hpcjoe wrote: post #156
social_quotient wrote: post #65

Might be off topic but a nugget from having two girls (5 and 11). Kids don’t care about budget or how much things cost. We have toys we’ve spent hundreds of dollars on only to have the near free to free one be a hit. I say this to make sure you know your employment status likely only effects your kids if it effects you. Or said differently, to the extent it effects you it will effect them. Kids will generally have fu…

> Best of luck buddy and squeeze these years for as much as you can. This ... so much ... Just be there. Discover together.

My spouse and I know this with our 5- and 1-year-old.

We have a song that we play to remind ourselves of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_HsMQ_AQw

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