Ask HN: Seeking ideas for preschool/school projects

* Number acuity - This is the skill of visually knowing the number of things by looking at a collection of things without using a counting system, for knowing the number of dots on a card instantly from vision only. Some children struggle with as a few as four, but most will average around 6. The most brilliant of people will top out around 11. Tree sloths can do around 40.

* Tree model navigation - This is the abstract skill of navigating data points via node relationships in a large data model. Children are surprisingly better at this than adults, but its still makes for fun puzzle adventures. Females are far more gifted at this than males. Even in programming where this is a very real skill most male programmers who do this for a living are absolutely terrified of it and will make up all kinds of bullshit excuses to avoid reasoning about it.

* Cause and effect - This is far less straight forward than most people consider especially when both the cause and effect are points taken from an abstract set of relations. Adults actually fail at this skill just over half the time.

* Greater than and less than - This is another thing that is less straight forward than it seems and largely accounts of bias. Consider how people apply this form of comparison to non-numeric qualities or falsely equivocate non-numeric qualities to numeric values to ease their own reasoning. Examples may include perceptions of space/distance and whether a thing is better, more important, or more immediate than another thing.

* Measurement - This is another thing most adults, especially programmers, commonly fail at and also accounts for bias. Teach children how to measure things, what constitutes valid measures, when to apply measures, and what defines a measure.

* Listening - Listening is not hearing. Hearing is a physical sensual quality. Listening is an information processing quality necessary for empathy and following instructions. There are many adults that fail at this too for a wide variety of reasons. In childhood experiments males tend to do better at listening if the subject matter relates to an ordered list of instructions despite females measuring absolutely superior in language skills across the board.

  light bulbs, batteries and switches, all mounted on wood tiles and connected with alligator clips

They are ancient, but still the preferred method of doing many practical things. That's really something special.

Everyone, myself included, seems to love the ambiance of real candlelight, but for basic, utilitarian stuff like finding my keys in the dark or making a snack in a power outage, I'd rather use an LED.

If I want to hang something I'm just going to tie a knot, and I won't be annoyed at all that I don't have some fancy piece of hardware(Not that I'm against such things for hyper specialized applications or to help people with disabilities).