Several years ago as I was a growing kid, I used to build science toys at home. The concepts that I used to learn in school may or may not used to be part of those but that’s what used to excite my friends. Just as an example, I build my first electric motor at the age of 11 using a horse-shoe magnet, an enameled wire and few other parts from trash. It was so exciting when I could get it to turn a few times. But this success didn’t come right away… it was only after several attempts and even though I had a small book of instructions to make the motor. I never follow instructions exactly when I am assembling something. And most of the time I end up spending more time to get it right than getting it right the first time. But I have realized that this way I could develop a deeper understanding of the things. Because when something doesn’t work, you try another thing and you try again and again until you get it working. This self-teaching or learning albeit takes time. But one could consider it as a complementary education to what we learn in schools. As a matter of fact, it should be a “MUST” in my opinion.
An then later after several years as I was teaching my son and at times getting frustrated that why can’t he listen to me on how to do things, I realized my own mistake. I was not letting him learn by trial and error or not letting him fail at what he was doing. Once I corrected my mistake, he just started having fun at it. And like me, he started developing deeper understanding about the things.
Then I came across Suagata Mitra’s TED talk and his experiments with Computer in Hole. This fortified my believes and since then I have been a big fan of “let them fail, let them play” with science. No force, no competition, no end game other than let’s make something.
I have been a happy father of a happy son since then 🙂
Picture Credit: Sugata Mitra’s Computer in Wall! picture from web!