Stimulating Technical Minds
As a young man in college with a computer, before there were wifi networks, I set up my own network at school before the dorm building was even wired for ethernet. Instead I used coax cable and myself and another Mac guy got adapters and created a 1–1 network between our computers for gaming, stringing the coax outside the building all the way between our two rooms. Later, the first vestiages of serial communication appeared on campus with SLIP connections which basically was a phone line with PPP connectivity to the campus backbone. Wow, computer networking sure has come a long way since then with wireless networks capable of blowing away all the data transfer rates of those days without having to string a wire from A to B.
What I think I gained from the exercise of having to engineer my own networking and by being a part of the newly nascent internet was a set of skills I rely on to this day. Learn technology. Adapt technology. Invent technology.
As leaders in technology, we must create challenges that inspire young minds. We must have more gaps to inspire young people to rise beyond their skills to their capabilities.
There’s so much today that’s just handed to everyone in consumable, fully ready, easily digestible packages… and that’s something that sets back our progress. I hate to sound like I’m old, but it used to be a thing to buy a model and put it together and paint it. I know you still can, but I’m thinking there aren’t a lot of parents encouraging it. They don’t make the time to spend doing these things with their kids and so there’s a spirit of “raison d’être” that’s, I fear, being lost.
However, there are modern day model kits (not that models are gone)… things like the Lego Mindstorms® kits, Raspberry Pi units, Arduino, and even as of late, open AI tooling to help you explore technology with your family.
I read a really interesting piece about a kid who used ChatGPT to do his homework and made an 3D printer into a plotter to write out his homework with a regular pen on regular paper. To me, this kid, while lazy in not doing the homework, obviously felt that the technical challenge to do this work was more valuable way to spend his time and I agree. I think he’s built curiosity, behaviors, techniques, and skills that will be very highly in demand at some point in the bigger picture. Who wouldn’t want someone on their team who could seize a brand new technology, build an open source solution, and come up with a way that delivered results that were just so cool to think about?
I think the purpose of an education is really to give you the best practices for how to learn, more so than memorizing the date for event X. As parents who want to really do a solid for their kids, parents should be reinforcing those learn how to learn experiences at every opportunity. Bring up critical thinking. Buy them “not complete” solutions. Teach how to learn.
For those of us in corporate America, the opportunities we have are to support this as efforts with “take your children to work day” activities, being involved in schools with speaking, supporting educational efforts like FLL (First Lego League) by coaching and judging and business and technology organizations like Future Business Leaders of America with opportunities to present, judge, create tests, etc.
We should continue to invest in creating opportunities to augment those put forth by schools and parents and support them, especially for the children of our employees by loaning out Lego kits, Raspberry Pi units, and holding education sessions for employees to encourage them in how to build these behaviors.
If you want to spend some time talking best practices from what we do at IBM, I have a lot of exposure to all these kinds of activities and would be willing to talk about how to bring these efforts to your company. Reach out.