Engineer Parents Tip: Coaching Your Child to Become an Engineer
Engineer parents guide.
If there is anything that children have in abundance, it is curiosity. In fact, children, by their very nature, tend to be inquisitive and they tend to very creative in their interactions with the world around them. These can be invaluable traits for engineers.
While children tend to possess a natural bent towards engineering, the world of education does everything but promote those talents. Schools and existing curriculums fail miserably when it comes to developing the innate abilities of these children. Instead, the poor young ones are forced to stick to a rigid math and science curriculum. They are made to regurgitate facts without being allowed to implement those facts with creativity to find solutions to problems.
Engineer parents guide (Source: Engineering For Kids)
That’s certainly a very unfortunate situation for everyone. Thankfully, you can do something to help your young one grasp and understand the basics of engineering. In fact, there are people who are developing courses and modules specifically geared to children between the ages of 4 to 14. These curriculums are specially designed to include practical experiments to help the learning process.
Engineer parents guide (Source: CNN)
Simple exercises can be of great help. For example, you can explain about oil spills but let the children find out their own methods for cleaning up an oil spill. They can make mistakes but those mistakes will only let the child rethink about the problem and find a different solution. So, in other words, you are showing that failure can be a good thing. That is some radical thinking but it works. After all, engineers learn from their failures.
Of course, all of your efforts will be in vain if your child does not even have the right idea about the engineering profession. They may think that engineers drive trains when, in fact, they design and create them. So, help your child get rid of stupid notions and show them the true wonders of this subject.
Engineering, when you present it with formulas and numbers, is boring for the kids. Make it interesting for the child to understand the key concepts while they are learning them.
