Explaining Stuff to Kids

This is how the so-called Feynman Technique to learning stuff is defined:

1)      Step 1: Write down the concept you want to understand on a paper;

2)     Step 2: Explain the topic on that paper. Not how you’d explain things to your smart friend, but to a toddler. This part is key as it ensures you avoid jargon. And it helps identify the gaps in your understanding (they’re the areas you can’t explain to a toddler);

3)     Step 3: Go back and re-learn the gaps you identified. Then try explaining them again. Repeat until you can;

4)     Step 4: Read your explanation. Does it sound easy to understand? Is it confusing? Based on the answers, you may need to revise the explanation.

Anyone with a kid ends up having to follow the Feynman Technique to some extent or the other! I guess I’ve made some progress on this because the ultimate compliment my 7 year-old has paid me till date was when I told her something was too complicated to explain and she replied, “You’ve explained other things, right? So find a way to explain this as well”.

While going over a book on space, my daughter had this Aha! look when she came across a pic of a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs. So we do know how the dinos died, she said, not by volcanoes (the other theory she’d heard of), but by a “space rock”. Nah, I replied, we don’t know for sure, we only have theories. Why can’t we find out, she asked? Before I could respond, she continued, “Why can’t they just build a time machine, go back in time and find out?”

Not sure how to explain whether or not time travel is even allowed by the laws of physics, I instead replied, “Because they haven’t built one”. Big mistake: since she didn’t know that the very idea of time travel may be forbidden by the laws of physics, she picked on the only other option she could think, one that appeals to all kids: “So they are so dumb that they can’t even build a time machine. Hmmph!”

So my next assignment is to apply the Feynman Technique to explain the paradoxes time travel throws up, and thus the question as to whether it would even be allowed by the laws of physics (assuming the universe is consistent). But regardless of my success or failure in that attempt, I am now hopeful that the seed exists in her to one day like love sci-fi, Star Trek and Star Wars…

Another thing I’ve learnt about teaching a kid is that it’s easier if this condition that Jason Fried learnt from his discussion with Clay Christensen is first met:

“Paraphrased slightly, he (Christensen) said: “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

Plus, the answer “sticks” if it fits with other things you already know.

I ran into both those points as she continued the meteor-dino conversation, asking, “How could one meteor have killed off all the dinos? Shouldn’t the extent have been restricted to places near where it crashed?” I skipped the shock wave + heat wave parts, and jumped to the parts that she already has an idea of:

1)      Kicking up dust: A mountain sized meteor kicks up enormous amounts of dust. In extreme cases, this could cause suffocation;

2)     Food chain: The dust rose so high that it blocked out the sun. Less sun -> plants die -> herbivores die -> carnivores die;

Ok, she said, that’s for land, but how about the dinos in the sea? I didn’t have a good answer, and she tore into my feeble answer, “But you said that deep under the oceans, sunlight doesn’t reach anyway. So what difference would lack of sunlight make to dinos that lived that deep?” I had no answer to that, upon which her eyes lit up, “So there could be dinos deep inside the sea? That would awesome. I wonder if they’ve sent those robots with cameras to check?”

Whether or not they find dinos, kiddo, they always find weird creatures that far deep, not just in appearance but also in how they get energy, but that’s another Feynman Technique assignment for me.