Lately there’s been a push to get children involved in not just enjoying technology, but in making technology. Whereas a decade ago there was little available on the market for parents looking to engage their children besides grow-your-own rock crystals, there is now an abundance of products aimed at making the next generation of physicists, coders, and neuroscientists.
For example, a Facebook engineer wrote and illustrated a book called, “Lauren Ipsum,” that is designed for the purpose of teaching a coder’s logic and frame of mind, without mentioning any computers. As the preface of the books says, “The truth is that computer science is not really about the computer.” The author’s theory is that just as you can imbue future astronomers with a love of the constellations without a telescope, so can you get four year olds excited about coding without a computer. This optimistically elegant theory seems a little less believable in reality, since the book is one-hundred and fifty pages long and comes complete with an alphabetized index.
An alternative program which is much more likely to actually be used by children is, “CodeSpells,” the latest in computer games that teaches kids to code. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego created this game for the tween girl demographic. In order to cast a spell, the player must code the spell, from scratch, in Java.
Unsurprisingly, Google has taken the goal of teaching youngsters to code a step further, making a coding language unlike any other. This language is completely visual. It doesn’t require even a single character. It’s called “Google Blockly” and it functions much like legos, except each visual object is also a code object.
Other fields like Neuroscience are trying to get on the bandwagon and make sure that their subject is also accessible to the children. Unfortunately do-it-yourself neuroscience can often seem objectionable. The startup company “Backyard Brains” was founded by two soon-to-be Ph.D.s at the University of Michigan who felt school children just weren’t understanding neuroscience with the trite pictures and text that they were being taught neuroscience with. In order to create a more interactive learning tool, the group spent three years developing a “RoboRoach” kit. The kit allows kids to take a normal, live cockroach and make it into a remote-controlled “RoboRoach,” that can be remote-controlled through a smartphone (the $100 kit can be found at https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach).
Advertised as the “first commercially available cyborg,” the results are certainly impressive. However, the process to get turn a Roach into a RoboRoach is rather unpleasant, and includes steps that some people think teach kids the wrong lessons. The experimenter must do “surgery” on the cockroach in order to attach electrodes to its antennae. The surgery involves inserted a groundwire into its thorax and cutting off pieces of both of its antennae. There are certainly a lot of critics of this invasive procedure, and as a Backyard Brains Founder admitted to ScienceNOW, “we get a lot of e-mails telling us we’re teaching kids to be psychopaths.” However, not all fields are as simple to isolate from living organisms as computer science, and there might be some real value in introducing kids to the neuroscience field at a young age. Maybe even enough to risk inflicting pain on a bug and controlling it like you control your videogames.