Robots, Ideal Food for the Gifted Mind

I recently had the tremendous pleasure to judge at an elementary school tech fair.  A few decades back--no comments on this, please--when I was in elementary school we only had science fairs.  Ah, I remember fondly the work and the research I put into my "Air" and "Eye" projects.  Mine were really more research projects compared to what the kids do now.  Today there are fairs of various types and a tech fair allows children to develop a project in various areas of computer and Interent technology, from graphic arts to presentations and robotics.  And naturally the gifted children really stand out, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think.

The category I was asked to judge was robotics.  I suppose this is because of my programming background and the fact that I'm the President of a software company.  The hardware used in the projects were all kits, but it was surprising the varying complexity of the kits and the accompanying programming software (see my notes below).  What we were asked to grade the projects were rubrics such as whether the project worked as intended, how well the student understood the underlying programing concepts, and how well the student had picked up on problem solving capabilities with their project (i.e. did they learn only how to make their robot achieve the designated task, or did they generalize the problem solving capabilities of their kit and learn how it could be applied to other tasks).

I guess because of my love of programming and the fact that I love to see kids really "getting it" when it comes to creating a program, I tended to hone in on trying to see if the children had learned how to generalize their problem solving skills.  I asked questions like, "what would happen if you changed this?" and suggesting a change to their program; or, "if you wanted your robot to do this instead, how would you change your program?"  I found these questions super-effective in determining whether the child really understood the problem solving capabilities in developing software.  So parents out there whose children are building robot projects, perhaps you could encourage them to learn true problem solving questions by challenging them with these questions.

We judged about 8 projects, and as I said before the gifted children tended to really stand out.  Not only did they score high on the rubrics, and not only did they demonstrate true and solid problem solving understanding, but they were filled with enthusiasm (and in one case, almost overwhelmingly so).  Two projects stood out here.  One project was built with a Lego Mindstorm kit and the student had devised a very elaborate task that was even accompanied with a backstory (now, that's a gifted child).  His project worked as designed and he scored well on the rubrics, but he really stood out by being so into his project; indeed, it was hard to get a word in edge-wise to ask him questions!  The other project was much simpler, but unlike the other projects which relied on a graphical flow-chart method of programming, this project relied on writing lines of code in BASIC; not only did the child have to demonstrate problem solving skills, but he had to learn a true programming syntax.  His command of programming for problem solving was solid, and while he wasn't bouncing off the walls, his passion and interest in understanding how to write code was obvious.

I hadn't realized there were so many different types of robot kits now.  If your gifted child is interested in a robotics project, I'd recommend you take a look at the following kits:
LEGO Mindstorms - a staple, allows for creative construction of robotic devices, supports a variety of feedback sensors, and the programming is a nice, powerful, visual environment that is easy for both children and non-programming skilled parents to learn and work with.
Robotic Arm Edge - a robotic arm kit that can mimic the very practical tasks of industrial robotic arms; the kit is not nearly as an open construction platform as LEGO, but will help the child focus on tasks and programming problem solving. This kit also has a nice and powerful visual programming tool that teaches programming techniques, including objects and properties, plus it has the nifty feature of being able to control the arm in real time.
Mobile Robot Base Kit - this kit is for children that can rely on lots of help from Mom or Dad.  It is a mobile device with two wheels that requires pretty low level programming.  It has some modular sensor capabilities and will be best served with someone with skills working with electronics.  This kit will really require the student to hone their programming skills, so I recommend it only for children who have already demonstrated an ability to learn procedural programming.

One last note for this blog; all of the projects I judged were by boys.  I would love to see girls taking more interest, not necessarily in robotics but in programming.

Highly Recommended Game for Gifted Children!

If your gifted child likes to build or is fascinated with the way things work, we HIGHLY recommend the game "Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions".  We bought this Windows-based game for our family computer years ago, and it has provided tons of fun ever since.

The Incredible Machine (often abbreviated as TIM) is a problem solving game in the form of Rube Goldberg-style contraptions to do a certain task and that are almost complete, but not quite: the player has to pick out and place items on the contraption that make it work.  For a very simple example, you have a contraption that starts with a ball at the top of an incline, and your task is to get the ball into a bucket at the bottom of the incline: you have to pick an item from a toolbag that will push the ball down the incline, such as a fan that blows the ball into motion.

The often whimsical collection of items you can use in your contraptions includes balls, inclines, balloons, candles, mice, conveyor belts, cats, pulleys, ropes, an anti-gravity pad, and much more.  The really neat thing is that the items behave according to real world physical principles: if you push a ball over an edge, it falls and accelerates properly.  Bouncing items deflect at proper angles.  You can also make adjustments to environmental properties--such as gravity and air pressure--to change your contraption's behavior, as if your puzzle was on the moon or in space.

The Incredible Machine allows single player and dual players racing against each other to solve a task.  It comes with several hundred ready-to-solve puzzles, and players can build their own contraptions just for fun.  Players can even experiment with the game's background music.  This is a very well thought out game.

Obviously TIM fosters problem solving skills and makes it easy (and fun) to demonstrate basic physical sciences.  If your gifted child is a budding physicist or engineer, they will enjoy this game immensely, as will the adults.

Gifted Children and Learning

Wow, how easily time can get away from you; it seems like just last week that we wrote our last blog, but that was actually back in October. Suddenly our weekends got busy, we even had a wedding in the family (Chuck's brother Dan), and voila! we're in the holidays!

Well, the fifth and final blog in our series of telling gifted children from bright children considers how gifted children learn. Unlike some of the other qualities of gifted children we've blogged about, a cliché about gifted children is fairly true here: gifted children seem to just "get it" more easily than other children. A bright child will master a task in 6 to 8 repetitions, but a gifted child will master the same repetition in 1 to 3 repetitions.

Think of learning multiplication tables. Bright children study their tables, review them with their parents and peers, and cite repetitions with their teacher; a table might be mastered in a few weeks through memorization driven by that repetition. The gifted child might only need to be exposed to a table, from which they recognize and infer patterns, and only after a minimal number of repetitions, they haven’t just memorized the table, they “know” it.

Repetition, in fact, tends to frustrate a gifted child, or instill boredom at the least. We saw this frequently with our own children. After all, few of us would want to read the same paragraph of text over and over, even once we’ve memorized it. These frustrations and boredom may come out as behavioral problems or with the child being regularly distracted and disconnected with their coursework.

We said a moment ago that gifted children don’t just memorize concepts, they “know” them. This is an important distinction, as it allows the gifted child to extrapolate concepts beyond what’s been exposed to them. Using the multiplication tables example again, once a gifted child has mastered up to the 3’s, they may not even require exposure to the 4’s and later. They have learned not only the table but also the underlying concepts of multiplication and they can infer tables that haven’t been exposed to them yet. They can manipulate and apply their newly acquired knowledge much more easily and cohesively than other children.

This ability to infer and extrapolate results in gifted children being able to produce material of an innovative and original nature. This isn’t true only of analytical topics such as multiplication tables; creatively gifted children will produce creative material of an original nature. Other children (and adults) who don’t understand might perceive that material as “weird” or “out there”, and it’s no doubt that gifted children—particularly creatively gifted—can march to the beat of a different drummer.

We hope that this series has been useful to you, and we hope that it helps a gifted child that you know. We’d like to hear from you about your experiences with your gifted child; you can post a comment here or you can email us at giftedgalaxy@gmail.com. We’d love suggestions for topics, but we’d most like to hear about your gifted child!

Gifted Children and Curiosity

All children are naturally curious and inquisitive; this is one of the many things that brings joy to parenting.  Plenty of parents might in fact mistake this natural curiosity children will exhibit with being intellectually gifted.  But there are notable differences between the natural curiosity of all children and the curiosity of bright children, and then again with the curiosity of gifted children.

Bright children will exhibit curiosity about almost any topic, asking questions, exploring, and wanting to know more; they will take it beyond just an immediate interest in a topic.  Bright children want to know a lot more about a topic than may be initially and superficially presented, and they will display the initiative to learn more than other children.  Gifted children take it several steps further, not only wanting to know about the topic, but to truly understand the topic from the inside out.  Gifted children might often exhibit an infactuation or obsession with a topic that goes on for long periods of time, and often results in such an understanding of the topic that they can predict outcomes related to the topic or can extrapolate their knowledge of that topic to other topics.  Their focus on learning the topic can be so intense that they have a hard time focusing on other topics until they've adequately satisfied their curiosity in the first topic (one of the reasons that gifted children don't automatically get good grades).

While bright children might research a topic to explore their curiosity, gifted children will initiate projects and experiments to test their preductions and assumptions about the topic.  The topics of their interests don't have to be academic: our daughter often obsesses over issues with her friends, and took learning to drive extremely seriously (fortunately for us, way more seriously than most teens do).  When gifted children come across a topic that interests them, they will latch on and it's often difficult (to say the least) to divert their attention.  Our son is a part-time intern for a software company and we were recently told by his supervisor that he is incredibly detailed oriented.  This attention to detail (when learning any topic) goes way back to his interest in topics from bats (the flying rodent kind) to reading (series of books) and more.

In summary, gifted children have a curiosity that goes way beyond that of other children, and (often) obsessively beyond that of bright children.  If your child displays such an infatuation with a topic, and their outcome is an amazingly thorough understanding of the topic, it might be an indicator that they are gifted.

Gifted Children and Imagination

Perhaps the most fun for the parent of a gifted child comes from a gifted child's seemingly limitless imagination and wellspring of ideas. There are different types of intelligences, and therefore different types of gifted intelligences, but we like to categorize them in 2 ways: analytically gifted and creatively gifted. We've said before that our son tends to the former while our daughter tends to the latter. So it might be logical to assume that it's our daughter who would be the more imaginative of the two, but for us that wasn't necessarily the case.

As early as preschool, long before being identified as gifted, our son would come home with the craziest (imagination on the wild side) and most detailed of stories. We still get a chuckle out of one of his stories where he claimed he and a friend pushed their teacher down the hill during recess. "And she rolled, and rolled..." The story went on and on, with incredible detail, enough so that--while we were pretty certain he hadn't actually pushed his teacher down the hill--we asked her about it at the next PTA meeting. His level of detail was quite convincing! And yes, it was all the product of his imagination.

That imagination hasn't abated, either. He's now a 20 year-old college junior who is taking World Literature. One night out to dinner recently he recounted for us the story of Gilgamesh. In amazing detail. On the way to the restaurant, all during dinner, and on the way home. He may still be talking about it, I'm not sure. While it wasn't the product of his imagination, it captured his attention enough that he had practically memorized the story. Somewhat related: gifted children will also converse with anyone willing to listen!

Gifted children can think in much more complex ways than other children. Their thinking can produce the most complex and detailed of ideas, as in our son's pre-school stories, and they can comprehend at incredibly high levels, as in his understanding of the story of Gilgamesh. This may be the easiest way to distinguish between a child who is bright and a child who is gifted: bright children will indeed memorize and recall content with ease, but gifted children will not only memorize and recall, but also extrapolate, infer, and create their own content.

Not to be outdone, our daughter too is a fountain of imagination and ideas, though more practical and grounded than that of our son (which would be really, really surprising if you knew our daughter). Her imagination comes out in her creative writing (she's been working on a book for a couple of years now) and in the particularness of her wardrobe (fortunately she's well beyond the dreadful goth years of junior high).

Gifted children often think much more abstractly than other children, as is the case with our daughter. In the late 90's (when she was around 8 or 9) there was a spate of disaster movies coming out (volcanoes, tornadoes, and storms; I'm sure you remember them). Having only seen the trailers on TV, she would turn to us and ask, "that can't happen here, can it?" She had taken the abstract concept of a volcano bubbling up out of the ground, or a tornado ravaging Kansas, and applied it to our own backyard.

Ah, the imagination of gifted children!

Gifted Children and Social Behavior

There's no doubt, gifted children march to the beat of a different drum, especially when it comes to social behavior. You'll remember from our previous blogs that gifted children aren't motivated by the same things that motivate other children. This might often be most readily apparent with their social behavior, including who they select as friends.

Gifted children will pick friends who not only possess the same interests as they do, but also who are their intellectual peers. Basically, gifted children tend to seek out other gifted children to hang out with (so it could be said that one way to determine if your child is gifted is whether they befriend other gifted children).

Because their selection of peers might tend more toward intellectual capacity, gifted children might not recognize normal social barriers and see no problem befriending adults and discussing with them topics that might pose challenging even between two adult peers. One of our favorite stories of our own son is that, at about 10, he had no problem discussing the biology of human reproductivity at dinner out one night with another couple, including details of how "squirms" (he meant the plural of sperm) were able to swim on their way to fertilization. The gifted child is comfortable with discussing the facts with anyone willing to listen!

Just as there are differences in types of intelligences (and perhaps directly related to these differences), social behavior can differ among gifted children. Our son was (and still is) highly selective with his friends, and their play tended more toward intellectual pursuits than otherwise (exploring rather than playing, building and constructing rather than exercising). Our daughter, on the other hand, was (and still is) much less selective but much more creative and representing much more complex relationships. If you haven't guessed, our son tends to be more analytically gifted while our daughter tends toward creatively gifted.

There may be some truth to the stereotype of the antisocial super-intelligent child (or adult, for that matter), but it's less a matter of antisocial behavior and more a matter of fewer and fewer intellectual peers for them to interact with. They are, after all, in the thinning end of the IQ bell curve. This is another reason why we believe so strongly in gifted education: it gives the gifted child more opportunity to identify intellectual peers.

Gifted Children and Academic Performance

For the next few blogs we're going to share some experiences with our own children on each of the 5 ways that gifted children differ from bright children that we covered in our previous blog, Your Child Is Bright, But Is He Gifted?  In this blog, we'll talk about academic performance.

Gifted children make all A's, right?  Not necessarily.  We were very fortunate that both of our children naturally (i.e. without much pushing from Mom and Dad) took grades seriously, but this isn't always the case with gifted children.  Often, the gifted child doesn't particularly care about grades.  That was the case for us parents when we (ourselves) were in school.  Our children, on the other hand, perhaps took grades too seriously; if they didn't get A's, they were upset and ashamed, i.e. they took it too hard.  Being too self-critical when it comes to grades is a common trait among gifted children.

It is true that gifted children might not have to work hard to get good grades.  In fact, they might only listen in class, never study, make brief notes at best, and consistently make As and Bs.  They just get it easily.  Once they hit a topic that challenges them, they might not be accustomed to having to focus, so this can eventually pose a problem.  This is one of the reasons we think that gifted education is so vitally important.  For example, our son had always been able to "skate" through class, but once he got to college and took Physics and Calculus, he found he couldn't do that; he actually had to study.  Our daughter, now in college, is having to grapple with Philosophy, which she probably thought was going to be an easy A.  We'll report back on how they're both doing toward the end of the semester.

Parents will notice that children, like adults, organize themselves into groups--for social and many other reasons.  In the classroom it will be interesting to the parents of gifted children to observe the groups their children participate in.  You might think that gifted children will form their own clique, and while this might be true, often gifted children are totaly outside the academically bright cliques, or "groups of their own".  Our own children both followed this pattern, though somewhat differently: our son was much more individualistic, highly selective of his peers, while our daughter was much less selective but tended to assemble or partipate in groups that were - how shall we say? - "creatively unique".  Note that gifted children aren't just the kids that excel in math and science, but also the ones who are exceptionally creative (think Picaso vs. Einstein); our daughter is more of the creatively gifted type.  We'll talk about types of intelligences in future blogs.

Finally, gifted children, because they are motivated in much different ways than other children, often don't pander to their teachers.  It's been said that bright children are teacher pleasers, gifted children are not.  Gifted children often pursue their own intellectual interests, even if they are at odds with the teacher's goals (this can obviously lead to poor grades, or the incorrect label of "unmotivated").  Gifted children will ask their own questions, perhaps before they bother to answer the questions their teachers asked.  We can hardly say that our son bothered himself with pleasing any teacher, but he was more than willing to report to us when a teacher said something incorrect.  Our daughter, on the other hand, tended to be at odds with teachers a little more frequently than our son; her creative approach was often misunderstood by her teachers.

The most important thing to remember about gifted children: academic performance--A's and B's--are not directly related to their capabilities.