So we all just came through the holidays, which for kiddo
meant a couple weeks free of school. In part to get some good bonding time and
in part to make sure he wasn’t being passed from one family member to another
all break I used up all my vacation time and hung out with him between Christmas
and New years. We went on a hike, went
to OMSI (membership rocks folks), and built Legos.
Another goal for the break was to keep the electronics,
specifically video games to a minimum. Now to respond to the cry from my
contemporaries that I’m already hearing ; I do not object to kids spending some
times with video games, some of them can even be used as teaching tools, and
are good for hand eye coordination, decision making, attention, and so on.
However we at least notice some behavior issues when kiddo spends too much time
with the Xbox, his activity level goes way down, and if you leave him to his
own devices he will just drift from the Xbox, to his tablet, to the game boy,
to the computer, and so on. So by staying home with him he got attention, along
with imposed breaks, other activities, and over all I think we had fun.
One project I was really excited about was building a robot;
I found a simple Arduino controlled kit that we could easily put together. What
I liked about it was that it had something to challenge both of us, and I was
able to use it to explain things like how bats and dolphins get around. Kiddo seemed
to have fun, I was able to put a screw driver in his hand and help him build
our little machine, show him how an ultrasonic ping sensor worked a bit, and we
talked about how our robot was able to drive its self around the kitchen
without running into things (mostly). And he really did get excited by it, it
certainly helped his ego a bit.
-ITBrewer
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