Curiosity Machine
Build projects with the support of online mentors in the Curiosity Machine.
By building Iridescent design challenges with your children, you model curiosity, courage and persistence.
Children will progress from following directions to planning and drawing detailed model sketches, comparing different designs, persisting through failure, and finally coming up with completely original solutions and designs.
With hundreds of hours of practice, a child develops skills and achieves the following milestones:
500 hours
After 500 hours of practice (starting at 3 years of age)
- Child notices features such as size, types of movement, cause and effect.
- Child is able to verbally describe the problem and propose a design for the model to be built.
- Child follows (verbal, pictorial or written) directions and builds a model
- Child troubleshoots model and gets it to work
- Child understands that objects in the world are designed and can be re-designed
750 hours
1000 hours
1300 hours
The home is a wonderful and safe sandbox for nurturing children’s creativity, critical thinking and courage.
Start now!
Water Machines
Ether Games
Explore the physics that make our world mysterious and wonderful as you play. Download Ethers Games.
Don’t worry if you are not familiar with Science! These are some tips to make you feel comfortable when working with your child.
Parents are models of lifelong learners
Building Iridescent design challenges together is an opportunity for you to model and shape the characteristics of a life long learner for your child. “I don’t know. Let’s find out.“ Or”Let’s ask” should be the most common responses to the questions your child asks.
What you say counts
You can support your child’s development by encouraging them to think about what they are doing instead of their natural talents and abilities–emphasizing the process of making something instead of how good your child is at something.This sort of encouragement helps develop a growth mindset, meaning that your child:
- aims to learn, instead of aiming to look talented at all costs
- believes that effort is key (instead of thinking that success comes naturally if you are “smart”)
- capitalizes on mistakes to learn from them, instead of trying to hide errors or deficiencies.
Your responses to your child’s work can help promote a growth mindset. For instance, comments like:
“you could have given up when that part didn’t work, but instead you kept trying and now its functioning well”
or
“I like that when your design didn’t work you kept trying new things and different ideas”
emphasize the importance of persisting through failure and draw attention to the way learning is a continual process.
Questions can shape minds
The questions you ask can also push your child to think deeply about information.
Divergent questions generally allow for multiple answers, and force kids to think deeply about information, as they demand an understanding about the relationships between the facts and the questions.
Instead of asking questions like “who?” “what?” “when?” or “where?” divergent questions ask “how many ways could you…,” “in your opinion….” “what do you think would happen if” and draw on a child’s judgement, opinion, and creativity, asking them to defend, predict, or compare information.
The aim of this sort of feedback is to help children confront their own ideas, and be motivated to modify those ideas, becoming comfortable with failure and adaptation.
Be Curious. Be Persistent. Be a Role Model.
As a parent you are also likely used to playing with your child–which transfers well to learning science and engineering concepts in an open-ended way. Because parents are used to playing with children, they can learn alongside children in this hands-on, open-ended model, failing often, trying again often, modeling the true scientific process. Science is a creative process, with multiple answers to questions, and a continually developing understanding through increased experimentation and modeling.
Play together, explore together, fail often, try again often – working and learning alongside one another.
As a parent you are also likely used to playing with your child–which transfers well to learning science and engineering concepts in an open-ended way. Because parents are used to playing with children, they can learn alongside children in this hands-on, open-ended model, failing often, trying again often, modeling the true scientific process. Science is a creative process, with multiple answers to questions, and a continually developing understanding through increased experimentation and modeling.