Homeschoolers Hungry for Technology

Over the weekend I attended the 2009 Minnesota Homeschool Conference in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. The conference is not unlike those Cadence participates in, not as big or as glamorous as DAC, but it could be growing faster as there seems to be no slowdown in homeschooling. Most of the time parents are sifting through books and other curriculum trying to figure out what to teach kids from preschool through high school and listening to motivational talks about how stay organized and focused.

Since moms tend to do most of the educating there are probably more women at the conference with dads there to give support, guidance, hold babies, and pay for all the great stuff kids use to learn. One of the sessions that caught my eye on the program was presented by Lego Education. I arrived at the session a few minutes late and the room was already jammed, every chair was taken and people were standing in the back. The presenter was demonstrating a Lego WeDo robot, it was some kind of boat connected to a PC and moving back and forth as if it was riding on the waves. There was a software program used to control the boat via USB. 

As I looked around it took me about a minute to figure out the room was jammed with a bunch of dads that all looked like engineers. As the demo proceeded, spontaneous questions started coming from the audience. When the presenter demonstrated how a random delay could be inserted into the program to make the boat sway at different rates, somebody practically jumped of their chair asking if the random delay could be controlled, like a short random delay or a long random delay. The presenter seemed dumbfounded and just said, "no, it's really random". I got the feeling the questioner would like to have Specman to program the boat and put some kind of constraint on the delay and maybe use a random seed. After about two more minutes, a guy asked, "What are the software requirements?". The presenter again seemed a bit astounded and said she didn't have exact details, but Windows and Mac were fine, to which the guy responds, "What about Linux?". I couldn't help but smile a little bit, but the presenter remained calm and gave a simple, "no". It would have been a good joke to respond with, "yes, but only Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE".

The presentation continued with more demos of the Mindstorms NXT robot and how to program the robot using National Instruments LabVIEW software.

When the presentation ended I had an interesting exchange with the guy standing next to me, it went something like this:

me: "it looks like a room full of engineer dads who are interested in doing robotics with their kids"

other guy: "are you an engineer?"

me: "yes"

other guy: "me too, what kind of engineer are you?"

me: "electrical"

other guy: "I could tell, you look electrical"

Oh boy. I didn't know I looked like an electrical engineer, but I could definitely spot a lot of engineers in the crowd. Engineers are generally do-it-yourself people, so this probably explains the connection to homeschooling.

My take away was that we hear and read a lot of negative stuff about engineering in the USA related to jobs moving to other countries and low numbers of students in university programs in engineering and computer science, but watching this short presentation about Lego robots I sensed a real interest among parents who want to teach engineering skills to kids. 

My 10 year old son has a LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot so I'm already teaching him about programming and embedded systems, but I'm always looking for more ways to do it. The Lego robot has an Atmel processor that includes an ARM7TDMI, USB, Bluetooth and more. While the LabVIEW toolkit is fine I would rather use something like URBI or use gcc with open source firmware to figure out how the hardware really works. I'm sure we will get to all this as he grows.

It occurred to me today that I should be teaching him how to make a SystemC Virtual Platform for the NXT to model everything and debug it so when we starts getting serious about software development he will be able to write better software. He can also use ISX to verify the software works correctly. That sounds like a a good father/son project for this summer (or maybe next summer).

I'm sure there are many other engineers passing the profession on to kids in many different ways. I'm interested to hear from you how you do this and any specific books or materials you use to teach kids. One I have looked at but not used is the DIY Calculator written by Clive (Max) Maxfield. I was actually working with on a project with Max back at Axis while he was working on the book, The Definitive Guide to How Computers Do Math : Featuring the Virtual DIY Calculator.

Beyond the Lego presentation I didn't see much at the homeschool conference in terms of things to use to teach kids technology. I would love for you, the readers, to share more ways to teach kids about engineering and computer science and maybe I can pass them on to parents at next year's conference.

Thanks for reading.

Jason Andrews