Little Scientist - 2: Explanations

If you thought that that finding one’s kid showing interest in science experiments would be satisfying, you’d be wrong. Parents would have identified the next peak to be scaled, in this case Mount Explanations.

We bought my 6 year-old this kit called Snap Circuits. It had Lego-like blocks for capacitors, resistors, wires etc. The manual would tell you different ways to join the blocks to produce different effects e.g. a fuse, regulating fan speed, dimming a light etc. Awesome kit, thought my wife and I. To my daughter though, it began to feel repetitive after a point. The output of all these circuits seemed to usually be one of the following: a light turns on (or off), a fan spins, a speaker makes sounds. And so her damning verdict of the kit was that dreaded word, “Boring!”. And that meant all attempts to explain how a circuit (or its components) worked was doomed from the start… But she did seem to like some of the applications, like the fuses I showed in the house. Or maybe she just enjoyed the chance to throw the fuse switch for every room in the house: Let there be light (or not)!

Then there was the time I explained how a magnifying glass works. No response. Maybe it’s too tough for her, I thought. Months later, she did the experiment where a pencil appears to be bent when dipped in water. As I started to explain the phenomenon, she cut me off saying, “I know why it happens… light bends or light bounces or something”. Does this mean she did get the basics of refraction and reflection from my previous attempts? Not one to give up, I waited patiently for my chance. Months later, my patience was rewarded. She was told the order of the rainbow colors at school: VIBGYOR, with Red as outermost. Does it always have to be that way, I asked. Yes, she said smugly. Not necessarily, I said. She was curious. So I drew the sun, water drops, and light getting split. Sometimes, just sometimes, I told her, there is total internal reflection to produce the “flipped” rainbow. She was very happy to learn this. Though the real reason was that she got to tell her friends (and maybe teachers?) that they were wrong about the rainbow. But I’ll take the win anyway…

Maybe you feel that I’m rushing her into explanations, but this incident will show what the alternative is. She saw this huge wired mesh around something from a restaurant. What’s that, she asked. A transformer, said my wife. What, she said shocked (pun intended), will it come alive? It took a moment to realize that her knowledge of transformers was based on the Transformers movies, where alien robots disguise themselves as daily machinery, mostly vehicles!

So you see, without explanations, she’ll be one of those people at the wrong end of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And yet I am pretty sure this is how she views all these explanations: