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by russellbeattie
1589 days ago
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My son, now a sophomore at UCSC, definitely gave me a few moments of "Uhh... I really hope my kid isn't an idiot" at that age. Living in Silicon Valley, he had friends creating crazy Gary's Mod levels using Python (this was a decade ago) that they collaborated on using GitHub. I was shocked at how sophisticated junior high coders could get! My son, however, is not a techie and like his father, has always been a little immature for his age. I was like, "Why is my kid the only one who isn't a genius!?!" It all turned out well and now he's happily studying economics (yeah, my apple didn't land anywhere near the tree). Everyone matures at their own pace, and computers, as I'm sure all of us know from our own history as geeks, are easy to impress people with. If you're really into biology, animals, astronomy, etc. what can you show people to wow them? Not much that hasn't been seen before. But any 13 yo can download and learn how to use the latest professional CAD software, the same IDEs pros use to make AAA games, or the same backend AI services used by major companies. And they are encouraged to do so! I can't imagine there's a lot of "Learn CRISPR at home!" tutorials out there. That makes a big difference. |
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My path into biology was looking into a microscope and seeing a world of non-computer state machines that behaved like cellular automata. and then my path led back to computers because real biology is much harder than CS.
And I think some kids get into astronomy if I demo my telescope showing them planets and stars. But I don't really push kids too hard in one or another direction; my parents thought I should learn german so I could excel at organic chemistry
go slugs