[geraldwhen]

You can hand a teen a college textbook and they’ll flourish if they have interest. There’s no audience here, sadly.

Kids are smarter than you think. A 7 year old could certainly follow anything, given the right instruction. If I can teach a 7 year old long division, I can teach them how a JK flip flop works.

[xandrius]

The main question would then be: why would anyone want to learn about flip flops. I dabble in Embedded Systems, prototype boards and the likes and still never really needed to know electronics as deeply as I had to study it at school. The need started and stopped at intellectually pleasing my teacher enough to get the grades I wanted.

Same with knowing how to use binary, I'd say outside of the education system, probably less than 1% of people ever need that type of knowledge. But most need problem solving skills and that's still not as readily taught unfortunately.

/edu-rant

[Aeolun]

It’s probably be interesting to teach binary in conjuction with decimal just for the knowledge that there’s nothing special about base 10? All your math still works fine when you have fewer symbols.

[xandrius]

Yeah but I wonder if that is that an interesting realisation for a kid or perhaps it's better to wait and, if interested in mathy thing, blow their mind later on?

[Aeolun]

> A 7 year old could certainly follow anything, given the right instruction.

Sure, given enough interest. If I ask my 5 year old to figure out which Beyblade is strongest I’m sure he’ll keep at it for hours.

If I read him a story about something sciency it’s about 2 lines per page.

If I try to teach him the alphabet it’s a struggle to get even a single letter down.

Part of teaching effectively is knowing what you can get away with.