1. User knows exactly what he wants.
2. User can only express that in his own language.
3. Data flow diagrams, best practices, structured design, etc.
4. Dev still doesn't know what user wants but builds anyway.
5. 2 years later, project scrapped.
Scott Nesin:
1. User knows exactly what he wants.
2. User can only express that in his own language.
3. Developer patiently encourages user to express himself.
4. Eureka!
5. Much learned; happy ending.
It is a rare developer who can handle the Nesin step 3. It requires an empathy that doesn't come naturally to many engineers. However, when cultivated, that empathy makes for phenomenal developers. When I manage development teams, that is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved.
[empathy] is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved
You win. I've stumbled across a handy mental model (in which empathy plays a pivotal role) through research on mindfulness, emotion, and neuroscience, as well as in an emotional intelligence course taught at Google by Chade-Meng Tan. In short:
It turns out that your brain uses the same machinery to model your own emotional state as that which it uses to model the emotional states of others, so the better you are at identifying your own emotional states, the better you will be at identifying them in others, which will allow you to communicate more effectively and so forth.
Feeling potential for a new buzzword-methodology in this. It's common sense, but not so common that you can't charge for workshops/talks/certifications.
The only thing you need now is a good, substantial name that evokes a mechanical and engineering process, like "User Language Oriented Design".
Our local supermarket is a great primarily organic shop. They have carts made for the little ones and we normally use that to do all our shopping.
I usually let him pick things down from the shelves or give him things from them to put into his cart. Sometimes his picks are random but mostly he fetches three things that I normally get.
1. Milk
2. Pasta
3. Swarts Broot
After that we go to the counter and he fetches the things for me to put up on the desk. He now even packs it.
I have found that involving him like this makes it much easier to set boundaries because he can relate to them.
It's quite different to be told to put only some of the things back rather than everything.
It's quite amazing to experience the emergence of consciousness.
This story has a great moral, and from a younger-person's standpoint, I think it's something every parent should consider: enable, and don't obligate.
Encouragement itself is a dangerous path, since it can lead to an unhealthy zeal and interest. Unless you're parenting in an unique way, parents usually are seen as an authority figure by the kids. Because of this, over-encouragement could be seen as forcefulness, and act to discourage the child by creating a sense of obligation. This is exactly what happened to me on multiple occasions. I swam breast stroke competitively when I was younger, and stopped training completely when my coach and my parents decided I should train for higher level competition. I also played badminton on a provincial level, and basically the same thing happened. This isn't me being lazy. I trained 9 hours a day last summer at the Shaolin temple on my own will.
On the other end, everything I've built (or done, other sports included), I've done so on my own accord, either with no support from my parents, or just a slight tinge of interest. I guess every child is different - just make sure not to make them feel obligated.
I also see this as an aversion to being manipulated. People (kids, adults) definitely react in different ways to this, it's why you have to be careful about generalized advice. Some kids would flourish being "pushed" into something, others experience an almost allergic reaction to seemingly blunt manipulation and obligation. The exact way parents and coaches reward and encourage the kid also matters, and matters differently to every kid. You just have to figure out what each kid is like.
it's why you have to be careful about generalized advice
This is so true. There is no generalized advice that will work for all parent/children combinations. Every child is different and will require different inputs to affect optimal outputs.
Having said that, I will give one piece of generalized advice: know your kids. Notice my advice is on how a parent should behave, not the child. :) Really spend time with your kid(s) and learn how they tick. Only by doing that can you hope to understand how to help them achieve their potential.
He builds pretty amazing stuff like indoor trampoline [0] and a robotic spider [1]. Due to his increasing popularity and requests to learn from him, he created the adventure builders club: http://jamius.com/abc/abc.html
- I think the people at our Home Depot would not have been as irritated and would have led the way to the paint department, maybe it's regionally different
- My girls go for spray paint 10 out of 10 times
My daughter had a 4th grade "invention convention" project and she chose to build a anti-kick board for her desk so the boy sitting opposite couldn't kick her. It also had comfy footrests. The boy's side had an Italian and her side had a German flag (the respective nationalities) spray-painted. It ended up looking really nice and the teacher let her keep it on her desk for a few days. That project encouraged her to build some tables for her room.
This sort of story makes me sad. We don't have a tree house, we don't even have a tree. We don't have money to spend at the DIY store to keep the house in shape never mind making checkers boards for fun. I thought I was getting pretty good at quenching the covetousness that society seemed to have imbued me with but when one realises that stuff is needed for many uplifting experiences.
Realising the great joy certain things brought me as a kid and realising that those things are beyond the reach of my kids ... Gah.
A happy story made me sad; I'm too easily depressed.
I made a 'Ponyo' boat out of a used soda can (which I took from the office), a used milk/juice carton (which I took for a party I went to). Didn't cost anything (even the glue I used was the end of a pot of epoxy I've had for years).
That looks really good ... going to need a hot-glue gun first. Actually though some multi-purpose tube glue that I use to stick my shoes with should do it. Still not free.
It's funny, so often with these makes there are hidden costs. Silver spray can is quite expensive where I am. Of course you can skip that part.
We don't have a tree house, or a tree, either. The lesson I've learned from having two boys on one grad student's stipend is that they would almost always play with an empty milk jug than some plastic toy from Kids'R'Us. We have a bunch of big old fancy plastic toys people gave us and the boys have spent a total of about 10 minutes looking at them. How long have they spent building towers from old cardboard boxes and knocking them down? I haven't counted, but it's a long time.
There's a hidden advantage to this: if you're wealthy it is harder to raise your children to be resourceful without money. Growing up, money was one resource I did not have much access to; instead, many of my toys were self-built, my projects often involved making money, and my motivation sprung from necessity. I really couldn't have asked for a better education as an engineer/entrepreneur.
While money makes things a lot easier my kids make most of their things from the boxes, paper packaging, old clothes and wrapping paper that we stash away. We bulk buy PVA glue for them to use from DIY stores so it really costs very little for them to experiment/play.
There's got to be a surplus/junk store like http://sciplus.com in your area (that one's got locations in Chicago and Milwaukee). Boatloads of cheap arts and crafts materials: cotton balls, tissue paper, glue sticks, chalk, markers, etc. I spent $30 there and got about four shoeboxes full of random crap for my nieces to craft with.
Dollar stores are great for this stuff. And office supply stores can be especially nice during back-to-school sales. And wander down every aisle in the drugstore - wooden spoons! Cupcake liners! Ping-pong balls!
I've never seen a place like SciPlus in your link.
However, can I drag you back to my initial bleatings - the point being that it is a rich persons gift to their child to allow them free rein in such a hardware project.
Yes we have lots of craft materials that we've acquired over the years, no we don't have $30 to spend on "random crap". But this precious little to do with where we started ...
We're pretty creative when it comes to craft. Yes we reuse what packaging and what-have-you that we can but this isn't at all the same experience as a kid thinking "hmm I'd like to make a checker board" and then being free to go out and buy the materials and make it with their dad.
Lets be honest, you can only make so much out of plastic drinks cartons and cardboard packaging. Even then it's like, oh we need some clamps, a decent trimming tool, etc..
Don't worry I'm just exhausted with "making do" at the moment. At the risk of broadcasting a break down I think I'd better slip away quietly ...
You can get cheap (essentially free) and perfectly good wood from recycling centers and such places. You don't need a tree to make a fort. I had a tree fort, but I honestly think the most important part is the fort. Even if it's only four feet tall and sitting on the ground, it will still be boat-loads of fun.
You don't need a large amount of resources & cash to follow this style of parenting/teaching. The main point is spending the time, listening & follow your child's lead.
Too often as adults we take over, we are too quick to step in, solve problems, "help" & rescue. Playing dumb can be the smartest thing to do sometimes.
Awesome story. Been taking the same approach with my daughter. She's now 10 and is pretty fearless about wielding any tool or material needed to design whatever she's working on.
Reminds me of a story I once saw about Tinkering School for kids, where they let the kids conceive and builds project together. http://www.tinkeringschool.com/
My son (5) has his own workbench next to mine, and regularly likes to go "build stuff" with me. He's built several "houses" (random blocks of wood glued/screwed/nailed together) on his own, and loves helping cut/drill/nail whatever project we happen to be working on. If I'm working on electronics stuff he likes to take the voltmeter and check the resistance of various objects to see if it beeps.
I realized all the hands-on/building/tools/etc was really paying off when he changed the batteries in a baby bouncer completely by himself. (For those unfamiliar with anything baby related, this means he had to work a screwdriver and remove several screws to take the cover off just to get to the batteries - I know adults who can't really work a screwdriver.) He even had the appropriate remark of frustration when at the end of it all he realized he'd put the cover back in the wrong way and had to take the whole thing off and re-do it...
I don't have kids yet but when I think about parenting, this is what I always dream of. However, when I tell my "non-hacker" friends, they don't seem to get excited about it. I don't know why. For me, parenting is all about playing a supporting role in the kids journey to understand the world and learn to hack it for the better.
Awesome story, and a great lesson to all out there (current parents or otherwise)–kids know a lot more than many initially think.
Like this guy letting his kid run the show in the store, my parents gave me freedom with computers (old Macs that some schools were throwing out) when I was growing up, knowing that they could fix whatever it is I might happen to break, and that's given me the confidence throughout my childhood and up to the present day to always experiment and try new project ideas, knowing that mistakes can be fixed.
Given his parent's awesomeness, I'm sure Guy has seen similar benefits with having had the freedom to make project choices typically restricted to adults.
Slightly off-topic but most Home Depot's on the first saturday of each month hold a free kids workshop. They provide everything necessary to build something (spice rack, shelves etc). My son and I have attended many and their great.
My experience with my parents was quite the opposite. Whenever I would ask for help they'd present me with a heap of arguments why I shouldn't "waste my time on this stuff" and even try to stop me. I finally came to the conclusion that it's best not to ask them at all but try to do it secretly myself and only show them the end result.
The only other possible outcome was them doing it all themselves. Usually saying that they will do it faster and better and won't break or make anything dirty in process. Perfect example of how not to raise children.
This really brightened up my morning. A great story and surprisingly, a good twist. Much like his Dad, I had no idea what Guy was up to until the end. It really shows you how tuned in kids are. For any parent, this is a great lesson: let your kids lead the way. They may seems a bit crazy, but this is evidence that usually, they're not. Hands down, though, my favorite part of this whole story was imagining Guy running up to Home Depot employees by himself to ask for help. Adorable.
As the proud parent of a very chatty daughter of two, I wonder: what would be an equivalent sort of project for girls?
At the moment she likes Duplo/Lego because it's one of the few areas where we connect over the gender divide, but her other roleplay and games are all about caring and she's very empathic with other children (worrying when they cry etc). I do wonder whether pointing her towards hackerdom would really be the right thing to do.
The point is that she will find her own way, but she needs to see what different paths exist. So, don't hesitate to show her hackerdom, she can help so many people with hackerdom and even better show her this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758516 right above that might answer your quandary in a definite manner
I think the moral of this story is that it's not your business. She will decide what she want to do, and her parents should help, and not restrain her, or tell her what to do.
There are infinite possibilities for doing things in the world. If not building things, what about the kid who held a speech in front of the UN at age eleven and apparently moved lots of people to tears (don't remember - was it on HN recently?).
You could do some biology stuff, like EO Wilson who went on the trail of fire ants. Some biological drama is probably playing out right now in your backyard.
What I mean is: whatever interests your daughter, there is probably something useful/fun to do.
Guy's checkers table was no more a "project for boys" than a project for your daughter (or, better yet, by your daughter) would be a "project for girls". The thing I took away from the OP was to support your children in whatever they do, regardless of whether they want to have tea parties with their friends or climb trees or hack the NSA.
My son keeps asking me about how to "hack computers" and I'm pretty sure that's what he's on about. I keep telling him about how to program. Eventually I hope it will click.
I was brought up by an awesome dad like the one in the story in many ways, he just exposed me to everything that he was interested in. We had computer guts all over the floor, the garage was full of electronic parts he was fooling around with. No 2nd-hand television lasted that long in our house. A really strong memory for me as a young child was just hanging out with dad making/breaking things, and my dad not in any way playing favourite over me and my big brother (though I was only allowed to watch when they were putting computers together). I am positive that just this exposure gave me the impetus to follow my inclination into the world of making stuff as soon as I became dexterous enough to do so (whether it was anything I found interesting in a 'make stuff' book, treehouse expansions, modding my bike, breaking electronics). I think of it as having the 'scare' taken out of me - just being exposed to a technical workshop from birth meant that I didn't have to make that leap from 'I want to make stuff' to 'how do I make stuff' because my dad and brother had shown me that you just, well, make stuff and figure it out as you go. Now my nephews have the same life - I'm so proud of my 4yr old nephew when I ask him for a specific wrench size or anything from the workshop. Just through exposure he's learnt what all the tools are and what they are for. If he wants to grow up and be a hacker, that's great but whatever he chooses to do in life he'll always know that if something breaks he can try and fix it, or (hopefully) break it himself for his own needs. If your daughter is interested in being a hacker she'll let you know.
I've got two daughters 9 and 11 and so far they've built projects just like the one in the article (although our stuff ends up looking a bit less refined at the end).
It seems like our girls turned less "girly" once they started school and of course it helps both my wife and I are engineers. Pink spray paint is always an option...
What a wonderful lesson given by Scott and Guy. Mapping Scott and his young kid as Team leader and a developer respectively,we could figure out how a Team lead/Someone from Management, could encourage his developers to try out new things anda set their minds free by giving them freedom to do something which they love. It's kind of Google's 20% time rule.
Every Org which trust his non-managerial staff and allow them to try out things often progress and prosper much faster than companies where politics and bureaucracy often create obstacles.
Based on your corporate access policies, this web site ( http://gamesbyemail.com/WoodTape/Default.htm ) has been blocked because it has been determined by Web Reputation Filters to be a security threat to your computer or the corporate network. This web site has been associated with malware/spyware.
Threat Type: Othermalware
Threat Reason: IP address is either verified as a bot or has misconfigured DNS.
It already happened that Cisco IronPort has blocked legitimate sites, like www.rp-photonics.com, and from the
service desk reply I got it appeared that this was not the only case. Of course one gets used to go around the blocks with proxies, but I don't see the point in blocking stuff in the first place.
That writer's insistence on hanging back and not getting a little bit more involved in the project or at least helping out really annoyed me for some reason ... I had to skip to the end to find out what happened.
Parents who give their kids a regular diet of "High Praise", "Agreeableness", "Supportiveness" and "Positive Interaction", but don't send them to college create children who have higher socioeconomic statuses than children of disconnected parents who send theirs to college. Multiple studies done confirm this.
Adam Savage from Mythbusters claimed his love of building came from his parents encouraging him to make all sorts of crazy inventions. Moral of the story, encourage the children to build stuff, keep them on track but don't do it for them.
one of the nicest ideas I got from Adam Savage is the idea of a hardware store expense account. His father, instead of giving him an allowance, would give him a certain amount of money he could spend every week at the hardware store.
An artist who is a hero of mine, Toshi Iwai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Iwai) in his talks describes how his parents stopped buying toys for him when he turned 10. He was encouraged to design and build his own toys. When he talks about his art, he always starts by showing these great sketches and flipbooks he made as a ten year old.
anyway, I find this approach (expense account for building supplies, encouraging children to build their own toys) really quite inspiring and plan on trying to raise my children the same way when they are that age.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but that is a book, not a study. I've seen multiple studies that show parents who withhold praise raise higher achievers (personally, I don't like that, but none the less - the studies do exist)
> I've seen multiple studies that show parents who withhold praise raise higher achievers
Ok. I don't like that either.
I'd rather raise a healthy, curious, creative, passionate, and happy child.
I couldn't care less about what he achieves.
If he achieves nothing, so be it. In fact, on average, he won't achieve much ... but when he does achieve something, it'll blow your mind.
And that little drone you raised, who is desperately trying to catch your attention? He'll focus on titles and milestones. He can verbalize that. He can quantify it. He can get others (and you) to easily recognize his "achievement" ... more to the point, he will always be trying to put you in a position where you MUST give him praise, because you constantly hold it back.
You want to know what that looks like? BA, BS, MS, Phd, JD, 100K salary, BMW, etc. etc. ... easily quantifiable status symbols that can be placed in a study and can be easily used to force the parent to render praise. Is that really achievement?
You can encourage without fawning praise. A combination of letting my kids fail, talking about how to remedy and encouragement to get them over the 'getting started again' hump is working out great for my two kids.
This guy thinks his kid is cute, because it's his kid, but I don't like the part where he deliberately irritates everyone in the hardware store. I don't think your kid is cute, so please keep it out of my way.
Speaking from personal experience, I think the positives of this outweigh the negatives. I've had many customer-interactive part-time jobs in my life, and I think that it can be great fun when adults have their children do the interacting. So long as the store is not too busy, and the parents provide intervention when it is necessary (as in this particular story), I think that most people will not be inconvenienced significantly.
More importantly, I think that forcing your kids to do these types of interactions from a young age is very instrumental in their growth and development. While I am not well-versed in childhood development, I think that I rarely (if ever) was encouraged to do these sorts of things on my own when I was young, and that (possibly due in part to this) I had to break an irrational phobia of these types of social interactions at around the age of 18.
I was literally afraid to ask for help in a store, or to call a business for almost any reason. Mentally preparing for phone calls with strangers, even something as innocuous as finding out store hours, could leave me shaking.
Fortunately, I've managed to overcome this anxiety. I can't know for certain whether more of these types of interaction at a young age would have prevented this problem, but I think that it is reasonable to believe that it could have. The slight inconvenience is a small price to pay for this sort of developmental skill-building.
That's not to say that some people don't need to reign in their kids now and then, just that an appropriate amount of interaction is healthy and really not very annoying at all to others.
Well, you've all downvoted the crap out of me because it's not socially acceptable to publicly admit that you find any aspect of children annoying. Step away from the knee-jerk reaction, and read the author's own words:
'The fellow is already engaged with another customer, talking on a phone and looking at various plumbing boxes on the top shelf. [...] He is rather busy, and is starting to look around frantically for a parent to clear the matter up. "Tough luck, buddy," I think as I'm stepping forward.'
The part I object to is not teaching a child how to socialize. It's the deliberate abuse of a "busy", "engaged with another customer", and "frantic" employee under the banner of "tough luck, buddy" -- i.e. "it's a kid, so I can do whatever obnoxious thing I want and you have to put up with it". Also, "tough luck, other customer". Maybe this kid also needs to learn how to wait his turn, so he doesn't wind up a self-entitled asshole like his daddy.
I upvoted your comment because I think it's an important point, but I wanted to note something that I found bothersome: "people like you" is a rather broad brush to use when judging someone from a single comment. Perhaps less harsh would be "people who share this sentiment," as the original poster may be in every other way a decent person.
Typical enterprise developer:
Scott Nesin:
It is a rare developer who can handle the Nesin step 3. It requires an empathy that doesn't come naturally to many engineers. However, when cultivated, that empathy makes for phenomenal developers. When I manage development teams, that is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved.
[empathy] is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved
You win. I've stumbled across a handy mental model (in which empathy plays a pivotal role) through research on mindfulness, emotion, and neuroscience, as well as in an emotional intelligence course taught at Google by Chade-Meng Tan. In short:
Bodily awareness -> emotional self-awareness -> emotional other-awareness (empathy) -> effective communication -> healthy relationships -> happiness.
It turns out that your brain uses the same machinery to model your own emotional state as that which it uses to model the emotional states of others, so the better you are at identifying your own emotional states, the better you will be at identifying them in others, which will allow you to communicate more effectively and so forth.
Also relevant: Asana's Jack Stahl touches on the importance of empathy in a post post about peer feedback at work: http://asana.com/2011/06/peer-feedback-at-asana/
Edw519 comments in list. Edw519 turns every post into a list. Do you speak in list?...
"how are you this morning Ed"... "1) I woke up 2) I had some coffee 3) I checked HN 4) Hell yes I am ok" :)
Moral of the story: Scott Nesin should be in charge of all Enterprise Development Projects from here on out. :)
Moral of the story: have engineers only work on projects from clients who are related. Nepotism facilitates communication!
Feeling potential for a new buzzword-methodology in this. It's common sense, but not so common that you can't charge for workshops/talks/certifications.
The only thing you need now is a good, substantial name that evokes a mechanical and engineering process, like "User Language Oriented Design".
I have a son who is turning two.
Our local supermarket is a great primarily organic shop. They have carts made for the little ones and we normally use that to do all our shopping.
I usually let him pick things down from the shelves or give him things from them to put into his cart. Sometimes his picks are random but mostly he fetches three things that I normally get.
1. Milk 2. Pasta 3. Swarts Broot
After that we go to the counter and he fetches the things for me to put up on the desk. He now even packs it.
I have found that involving him like this makes it much easier to set boundaries because he can relate to them.
It's quite different to be told to put only some of the things back rather than everything.
It's quite amazing to experience the emergence of consciousness.
What is Swarts Broot? I googled it and it led me back to this post only
Schwarzbrot, literally "black bread".
I suppose it to be this typical black german/dutch bread (made from rye IIRC).
This story has a great moral, and from a younger-person's standpoint, I think it's something every parent should consider: enable, and don't obligate.
Encouragement itself is a dangerous path, since it can lead to an unhealthy zeal and interest. Unless you're parenting in an unique way, parents usually are seen as an authority figure by the kids. Because of this, over-encouragement could be seen as forcefulness, and act to discourage the child by creating a sense of obligation. This is exactly what happened to me on multiple occasions. I swam breast stroke competitively when I was younger, and stopped training completely when my coach and my parents decided I should train for higher level competition. I also played badminton on a provincial level, and basically the same thing happened. This isn't me being lazy. I trained 9 hours a day last summer at the Shaolin temple on my own will.
On the other end, everything I've built (or done, other sports included), I've done so on my own accord, either with no support from my parents, or just a slight tinge of interest. I guess every child is different - just make sure not to make them feel obligated.
I also see this as an aversion to being manipulated. People (kids, adults) definitely react in different ways to this, it's why you have to be careful about generalized advice. Some kids would flourish being "pushed" into something, others experience an almost allergic reaction to seemingly blunt manipulation and obligation. The exact way parents and coaches reward and encourage the kid also matters, and matters differently to every kid. You just have to figure out what each kid is like.
it's why you have to be careful about generalized advice
This is so true. There is no generalized advice that will work for all parent/children combinations. Every child is different and will require different inputs to affect optimal outputs.
Having said that, I will give one piece of generalized advice: know your kids. Notice my advice is on how a parent should behave, not the child. :) Really spend time with your kid(s) and learn how they tick. Only by doing that can you hope to understand how to help them achieve their potential.
Reminds me about this dedicated builder: http://jamius.com/
He builds pretty amazing stuff like indoor trampoline [0] and a robotic spider [1]. Due to his increasing popularity and requests to learn from him, he created the adventure builders club: http://jamius.com/abc/abc.html
Some more about him in this thread that propelled him to fame on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/e5qgr/so_this_guy_li...
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6c2K_ZVj3I&feature=relat...
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86Krv3gE-c4&feature=playe...
I'm pretty sure this guy will be able to single handedly rebuild human civilization after the apocalypse(1).
I love his current quest for a 3d printer that's open source and can run on his solar panels.
(1)With his kid strapped to him, wisecracking the whole time.
If you're interested in open source 3D printers, then you'll like these:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reprap
http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Main_Page (Not quite 3D printer, but on the 'rebuild human cilization' level)
amazing guy. thanks for sharing this.
Great story. Two comments:
- I think the people at our Home Depot would not have been as irritated and would have led the way to the paint department, maybe it's regionally different
- My girls go for spray paint 10 out of 10 times
My daughter had a 4th grade "invention convention" project and she chose to build a anti-kick board for her desk so the boy sitting opposite couldn't kick her. It also had comfy footrests. The boy's side had an Italian and her side had a German flag (the respective nationalities) spray-painted. It ended up looking really nice and the teacher let her keep it on her desk for a few days. That project encouraged her to build some tables for her room.
This sort of story makes me sad. We don't have a tree house, we don't even have a tree. We don't have money to spend at the DIY store to keep the house in shape never mind making checkers boards for fun. I thought I was getting pretty good at quenching the covetousness that society seemed to have imbued me with but when one realises that stuff is needed for many uplifting experiences.
Realising the great joy certain things brought me as a kid and realising that those things are beyond the reach of my kids ... Gah.
A happy story made me sad; I'm too easily depressed.
Aside: email games seems really retro.
I made a 'Ponyo' boat out of a used soda can (which I took from the office), a used milk/juice carton (which I took for a party I went to). Didn't cost anything (even the glue I used was the end of a pot of epoxy I've had for years).
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/06/making-ponyo-or-putt-putt-boat.h...
Fun to do if you have kids.
That looks really good ... going to need a hot-glue gun first. Actually though some multi-purpose tube glue that I use to stick my shoes with should do it. Still not free.
It's funny, so often with these makes there are hidden costs. Silver spray can is quite expensive where I am. Of course you can skip that part.
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We don't have a tree house, or a tree, either. The lesson I've learned from having two boys on one grad student's stipend is that they would almost always play with an empty milk jug than some plastic toy from Kids'R'Us. We have a bunch of big old fancy plastic toys people gave us and the boys have spent a total of about 10 minutes looking at them. How long have they spent building towers from old cardboard boxes and knocking them down? I haven't counted, but it's a long time.
There's a hidden advantage to this: if you're wealthy it is harder to raise your children to be resourceful without money. Growing up, money was one resource I did not have much access to; instead, many of my toys were self-built, my projects often involved making money, and my motivation sprung from necessity. I really couldn't have asked for a better education as an engineer/entrepreneur.
While money makes things a lot easier my kids make most of their things from the boxes, paper packaging, old clothes and wrapping paper that we stash away. We bulk buy PVA glue for them to use from DIY stores so it really costs very little for them to experiment/play.
There's got to be a surplus/junk store like http://sciplus.com in your area (that one's got locations in Chicago and Milwaukee). Boatloads of cheap arts and crafts materials: cotton balls, tissue paper, glue sticks, chalk, markers, etc. I spent $30 there and got about four shoeboxes full of random crap for my nieces to craft with.
Dollar stores are great for this stuff. And office supply stores can be especially nice during back-to-school sales. And wander down every aisle in the drugstore - wooden spoons! Cupcake liners! Ping-pong balls!
I've never seen a place like SciPlus in your link.
However, can I drag you back to my initial bleatings - the point being that it is a rich persons gift to their child to allow them free rein in such a hardware project.
Yes we have lots of craft materials that we've acquired over the years, no we don't have $30 to spend on "random crap". But this precious little to do with where we started ...
My mother used to save the plastic milk crates we got and we would use those and a bit of glue to make stuff.
Doesn't take that much.
We're pretty creative when it comes to craft. Yes we reuse what packaging and what-have-you that we can but this isn't at all the same experience as a kid thinking "hmm I'd like to make a checker board" and then being free to go out and buy the materials and make it with their dad.
Lets be honest, you can only make so much out of plastic drinks cartons and cardboard packaging. Even then it's like, oh we need some clamps, a decent trimming tool, etc..
Don't worry I'm just exhausted with "making do" at the moment. At the risk of broadcasting a break down I think I'd better slip away quietly ...
Trees grow in woods. So does wood. It is an elaborate lie fabricated by the home making industry that wood grows in home builder stores.
Really curious about your situation. How can there be nothing you can do?
You can get cheap (essentially free) and perfectly good wood from recycling centers and such places. You don't need a tree to make a fort. I had a tree fort, but I honestly think the most important part is the fort. Even if it's only four feet tall and sitting on the ground, it will still be boat-loads of fun.
You don't need a large amount of resources & cash to follow this style of parenting/teaching. The main point is spending the time, listening & follow your child's lead.
Too often as adults we take over, we are too quick to step in, solve problems, "help" & rescue. Playing dumb can be the smartest thing to do sometimes.
Awesome story. Been taking the same approach with my daughter. She's now 10 and is pretty fearless about wielding any tool or material needed to design whatever she's working on.
Reminds me of a story I once saw about Tinkering School for kids, where they let the kids conceive and builds project together. http://www.tinkeringschool.com/
My son (5) has his own workbench next to mine, and regularly likes to go "build stuff" with me. He's built several "houses" (random blocks of wood glued/screwed/nailed together) on his own, and loves helping cut/drill/nail whatever project we happen to be working on. If I'm working on electronics stuff he likes to take the voltmeter and check the resistance of various objects to see if it beeps.
I realized all the hands-on/building/tools/etc was really paying off when he changed the batteries in a baby bouncer completely by himself. (For those unfamiliar with anything baby related, this means he had to work a screwdriver and remove several screws to take the cover off just to get to the batteries - I know adults who can't really work a screwdriver.) He even had the appropriate remark of frustration when at the end of it all he realized he'd put the cover back in the wrong way and had to take the whole thing off and re-do it...
"Appropriate remark of frustration" - I can't think of any (contextually) appropriate remarks that are appropriate for a five year old.
"Shit" seems fine to me
Really inspiring.
I don't have kids yet but when I think about parenting, this is what I always dream of. However, when I tell my "non-hacker" friends, they don't seem to get excited about it. I don't know why. For me, parenting is all about playing a supporting role in the kids journey to understand the world and learn to hack it for the better.
If only I had more upvotes to give. This is the kind of story I come to HN for.
Awesome story, and a great lesson to all out there (current parents or otherwise)–kids know a lot more than many initially think.
Like this guy letting his kid run the show in the store, my parents gave me freedom with computers (old Macs that some schools were throwing out) when I was growing up, knowing that they could fix whatever it is I might happen to break, and that's given me the confidence throughout my childhood and up to the present day to always experiment and try new project ideas, knowing that mistakes can be fixed.
Given his parent's awesomeness, I'm sure Guy has seen similar benefits with having had the freedom to make project choices typically restricted to adults.
This is the best story on HN I have ever read.
I love the small print at the bottom:
You just know he did actually ask his 4-year-old son for permission to use his drawings on the web.
What's this kid building @ 11? That's what I wanna know.
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Agreed. This is amazing.
Slightly off-topic but most Home Depot's on the first saturday of each month hold a free kids workshop. They provide everything necessary to build something (spice rack, shelves etc). My son and I have attended many and their great.
That's a very inspiring story.
My experience with my parents was quite the opposite. Whenever I would ask for help they'd present me with a heap of arguments why I shouldn't "waste my time on this stuff" and even try to stop me. I finally came to the conclusion that it's best not to ask them at all but try to do it secretly myself and only show them the end result.
The only other possible outcome was them doing it all themselves. Usually saying that they will do it faster and better and won't break or make anything dirty in process. Perfect example of how not to raise children.
Are you middle eastern by any chance? :D
This really brightened up my morning. A great story and surprisingly, a good twist. Much like his Dad, I had no idea what Guy was up to until the end. It really shows you how tuned in kids are. For any parent, this is a great lesson: let your kids lead the way. They may seems a bit crazy, but this is evidence that usually, they're not. Hands down, though, my favorite part of this whole story was imagining Guy running up to Home Depot employees by himself to ask for help. Adorable.
As the proud parent of a very chatty daughter of two, I wonder: what would be an equivalent sort of project for girls? At the moment she likes Duplo/Lego because it's one of the few areas where we connect over the gender divide, but her other roleplay and games are all about caring and she's very empathic with other children (worrying when they cry etc). I do wonder whether pointing her towards hackerdom would really be the right thing to do.
The point is that she will find her own way, but she needs to see what different paths exist. So, don't hesitate to show her hackerdom, she can help so many people with hackerdom and even better show her this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758516 right above that might answer your quandary in a definite manner
> That's what made me realise I wanted to build robots when I grew up.
Just wondering: do you now build robots?
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I think the moral of this story is that it's not your business. She will decide what she want to do, and her parents should help, and not restrain her, or tell her what to do.
Here is the story of a girl who was raised to become a chess grandmaster by her dad: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
Just saying - girls play chess, too.
There are infinite possibilities for doing things in the world. If not building things, what about the kid who held a speech in front of the UN at age eleven and apparently moved lots of people to tears (don't remember - was it on HN recently?).
You could do some biology stuff, like EO Wilson who went on the trail of fire ants. Some biological drama is probably playing out right now in your backyard.
What I mean is: whatever interests your daughter, there is probably something useful/fun to do.
Guy's checkers table was no more a "project for boys" than a project for your daughter (or, better yet, by your daughter) would be a "project for girls". The thing I took away from the OP was to support your children in whatever they do, regardless of whether they want to have tea parties with their friends or climb trees or hack the NSA.
Well, OK, maybe not that last one.
>Well, OK, maybe not that last one.
You know a headline like "My weekend project: father/son NSA hacking" make for a great story to read on HN. ;)
My son keeps asking me about how to "hack computers" and I'm pretty sure that's what he's on about. I keep telling him about how to program. Eventually I hope it will click.
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I was brought up by an awesome dad like the one in the story in many ways, he just exposed me to everything that he was interested in. We had computer guts all over the floor, the garage was full of electronic parts he was fooling around with. No 2nd-hand television lasted that long in our house. A really strong memory for me as a young child was just hanging out with dad making/breaking things, and my dad not in any way playing favourite over me and my big brother (though I was only allowed to watch when they were putting computers together). I am positive that just this exposure gave me the impetus to follow my inclination into the world of making stuff as soon as I became dexterous enough to do so (whether it was anything I found interesting in a 'make stuff' book, treehouse expansions, modding my bike, breaking electronics). I think of it as having the 'scare' taken out of me - just being exposed to a technical workshop from birth meant that I didn't have to make that leap from 'I want to make stuff' to 'how do I make stuff' because my dad and brother had shown me that you just, well, make stuff and figure it out as you go. Now my nephews have the same life - I'm so proud of my 4yr old nephew when I ask him for a specific wrench size or anything from the workshop. Just through exposure he's learnt what all the tools are and what they are for. If he wants to grow up and be a hacker, that's great but whatever he chooses to do in life he'll always know that if something breaks he can try and fix it, or (hopefully) break it himself for his own needs. If your daughter is interested in being a hacker she'll let you know.
I've got two daughters 9 and 11 and so far they've built projects just like the one in the article (although our stuff ends up looking a bit less refined at the end).
It seems like our girls turned less "girly" once they started school and of course it helps both my wife and I are engineers. Pink spray paint is always an option...
The equivalent thing for girls?
Build stuff, obviously. Maybe not the same (I for one wouldn't have wanted a checker table as a kid), but building is something everybody should do.
>what would be an equivalent sort of project for girls?
Ask Her.
I learned last week my wife is pregnant. I was excited already, but after reading this post I'm impatient to be a father. Thanks for sharing.
What a wonderful lesson given by Scott and Guy. Mapping Scott and his young kid as Team leader and a developer respectively,we could figure out how a Team lead/Someone from Management, could encourage his developers to try out new things anda set their minds free by giving them freedom to do something which they love. It's kind of Google's 20% time rule.
Every Org which trust his non-managerial staff and allow them to try out things often progress and prosper much faster than companies where politics and bureaucracy often create obstacles.
My university blocks your site:
It happened to me too. Try http://gamesbyemail.com.nyud.net:8090/WoodTape/Default.htm or http://gamesbyemail.com.nyud.net/WoodTape/Default.htm
Odds are it's because of the word 'game' in the domain.
It already happened that Cisco IronPort has blocked legitimate sites, like www.rp-photonics.com, and from the service desk reply I got it appeared that this was not the only case. Of course one gets used to go around the blocks with proxies, but I don't see the point in blocking stuff in the first place.
I look forward to moments like this with my two sons, great story and really well told... thanks!
That writer's insistence on hanging back and not getting a little bit more involved in the project or at least helping out really annoyed me for some reason ... I had to skip to the end to find out what happened.
I love a story with a happy ending!
great story!
Parents who give their kids a regular diet of "High Praise", "Agreeableness", "Supportiveness" and "Positive Interaction", but don't send them to college create children who have higher socioeconomic statuses than children of disconnected parents who send theirs to college. Multiple studies done confirm this.
http://books.google.com/books?id=XDq9Xf_NbrMC&lpg=PT28&#...
Adam Savage from Mythbusters claimed his love of building came from his parents encouraging him to make all sorts of crazy inventions. Moral of the story, encourage the children to build stuff, keep them on track but don't do it for them.
one of the nicest ideas I got from Adam Savage is the idea of a hardware store expense account. His father, instead of giving him an allowance, would give him a certain amount of money he could spend every week at the hardware store.
An artist who is a hero of mine, Toshi Iwai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Iwai) in his talks describes how his parents stopped buying toys for him when he turned 10. He was encouraged to design and build his own toys. When he talks about his art, he always starts by showing these great sketches and flipbooks he made as a ten year old.
anyway, I find this approach (expense account for building supplies, encouraging children to build their own toys) really quite inspiring and plan on trying to raise my children the same way when they are that age.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but that is a book, not a study. I've seen multiple studies that show parents who withhold praise raise higher achievers (personally, I don't like that, but none the less - the studies do exist)
> I've seen multiple studies that show parents who withhold praise raise higher achievers
Ok. I don't like that either.
I'd rather raise a healthy, curious, creative, passionate, and happy child.
I couldn't care less about what he achieves.
If he achieves nothing, so be it. In fact, on average, he won't achieve much ... but when he does achieve something, it'll blow your mind.
And that little drone you raised, who is desperately trying to catch your attention? He'll focus on titles and milestones. He can verbalize that. He can quantify it. He can get others (and you) to easily recognize his "achievement" ... more to the point, he will always be trying to put you in a position where you MUST give him praise, because you constantly hold it back.
You want to know what that looks like? BA, BS, MS, Phd, JD, 100K salary, BMW, etc. etc. ... easily quantifiable status symbols that can be placed in a study and can be easily used to force the parent to render praise. Is that really achievement?
I'd rather my kid start the next Apple.
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You can encourage without fawning praise. A combination of letting my kids fail, talking about how to remedy and encouragement to get them over the 'getting started again' hump is working out great for my two kids.
I thought the latest was to praise effort, not achievements. Praising achievements might induce self-consciousness and make kids not try very hard.
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I don't think the bit was about praise, rather the act of stepping back and playing spectator.
If you expand the chapter you'll find the referenced study the author is drawing upon.
I'm sorry but I can't believe this.
This guy thinks his kid is cute, because it's his kid, but I don't like the part where he deliberately irritates everyone in the hardware store. I don't think your kid is cute, so please keep it out of my way.
Speaking from personal experience, I think the positives of this outweigh the negatives. I've had many customer-interactive part-time jobs in my life, and I think that it can be great fun when adults have their children do the interacting. So long as the store is not too busy, and the parents provide intervention when it is necessary (as in this particular story), I think that most people will not be inconvenienced significantly.
More importantly, I think that forcing your kids to do these types of interactions from a young age is very instrumental in their growth and development. While I am not well-versed in childhood development, I think that I rarely (if ever) was encouraged to do these sorts of things on my own when I was young, and that (possibly due in part to this) I had to break an irrational phobia of these types of social interactions at around the age of 18.
I was literally afraid to ask for help in a store, or to call a business for almost any reason. Mentally preparing for phone calls with strangers, even something as innocuous as finding out store hours, could leave me shaking.
Fortunately, I've managed to overcome this anxiety. I can't know for certain whether more of these types of interaction at a young age would have prevented this problem, but I think that it is reasonable to believe that it could have. The slight inconvenience is a small price to pay for this sort of developmental skill-building.
That's not to say that some people don't need to reign in their kids now and then, just that an appropriate amount of interaction is healthy and really not very annoying at all to others.
Well, you've all downvoted the crap out of me because it's not socially acceptable to publicly admit that you find any aspect of children annoying. Step away from the knee-jerk reaction, and read the author's own words:
'The fellow is already engaged with another customer, talking on a phone and looking at various plumbing boxes on the top shelf. [...] He is rather busy, and is starting to look around frantically for a parent to clear the matter up. "Tough luck, buddy," I think as I'm stepping forward.'
The part I object to is not teaching a child how to socialize. It's the deliberate abuse of a "busy", "engaged with another customer", and "frantic" employee under the banner of "tough luck, buddy" -- i.e. "it's a kid, so I can do whatever obnoxious thing I want and you have to put up with it". Also, "tough luck, other customer". Maybe this kid also needs to learn how to wait his turn, so he doesn't wind up a self-entitled asshole like his daddy.
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I wonder how people like you expect kids to learn how to socialise appropriately if they must be kept out of the way all the time.
I upvoted your comment because I think it's an important point, but I wanted to note something that I found bothersome: "people like you" is a rather broad brush to use when judging someone from a single comment. Perhaps less harsh would be "people who share this sentiment," as the original poster may be in every other way a decent person.
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The kid's a customer, they're customer service people. They should give the customer some service.
Kids have a right to ask for help in a store like anyone else.
This is America, the kid's money's just as green. (OK that was a little crass I admit :-)
And stay off my lawn!
Community? Maybe this kid will be fixing your house when you are too old and gimpy to do it.