Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“Because I said so”. It’s a phrase every parent uses with their kids. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to pull rank, but we don’t live in an ideal world: -          Some things are just too complicated to explain to a kid; -          Sometimes we’re not in a mood; -          There’s no time to get into all that; -          And last but not least, kids can be a pain deliberately . Pretending not to understand, testing how far they can push you, enjoying asking “Why” to whatever you say. And then there’s this other reason I stumbled upon based on this chat between my daughter and my wife. It started with my daughter asking whether my wife had stopped going to the gym. My wife replied that she was finishing the gym at office during lunch time, so it wasn’t visible to the kid anymore. This is how the conversation co...

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 ...