I know, right? Who knew Intel had a museum?

Welcome

Well, they do — it’s at Intel’s headquarters over in Santa Clara, at 2200 Mission Boulevard. It’s a couple of rooms of intro to microprocessors, how chips are made, how computers talk, the Intel story –

(Spoiler alert: they invented everything and are the most amazing so phbbbbtttt!!!!)

– and that sort of thing. Looking at the photos of Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and Andy Grove I was suddenly reminded of the time I interviewed Andy Grove for the Stanford Daily, a million and a half years ago.

The kids were mostly interested and happy. How could they not be? The museum has some real dinosaurs on display!

A blast from the Mezozoic

That’s an IBM PC, kids. Scary, huh? Wait until your parents tell you how to operate that thing without a mouse. Wait until they describe the floppy disks. The tour guide did have a floppy disk as a visual aid…a three-and-a-half inch floppy disk. I called foul and insisted they bring out the five-and-a-quarter floppy floppy disks.

(My first job at Stanford was teaching students at the Graduate School of Business how to use IBM PCs. Good times. Man, seeing that little machine brought back some memories.)

Some of the exhibits were not very well focused (“Uh…which part of this is the transistor in relation to the size of a human hair?”), but they had plenty of interactive stuff for kids to play with. They had some exhibits that I liked.

Yes. I am a nerd.

And some that were just kind of silly.

One kid got to dress up in an actual bunny suit. She said it was “hot.”

During the part where the kids got to do some hands-on electronics, they built circuits from one of those kits you can buy at toy stores. Simon has a couple of these kits, so he’s really familiar with it. He did try to answer every single question the tour guide gave, but she was fair and made sure other kids got to answer questions too.

Well. Sometimes.

It’s a popular little museum with fourth graders in this area, because the fourth graders are studying magnetism and electrical conduction, and the museum is completely free, including the hands-on demo area.

And you know…this kind of thing is part of our cultural heritage around here.

A nice quote to end the day with.

Both kids are doing First Lego League this year. Of course, they are on different teams (sigh) and going to different championship rounds (each round being a full-day commitment so MEGA-sigh). Our local organization is the Northern California Lego League; I’m sure you can find yours on the general FLL site.

It’s a really cool program. FLL was created to introduce kids to how fun and interesting science and technology can be through the gateway drug of Lego. Teams have an adult coordinator and sometimes a teenager helping out, but the kids have to do all the programming, all the project design, etc. There are three parts to the competition:

1. The robot game: What catches everybody’s eye with this tournament. The kids learn how to program a Lego robot to run around a game board and do various tasks, all within two minutes thirty seconds.
2. The project: The kids do research on the theme of that year’s FLL Competition and then present their findings to a panel of judges, whether through a skit or some other way of presenting it. All of the team members need to participate in this section, so it can’t just be one or two kids who enjoy talking.
3. The FLL Core Values: the driving force behind FLL is not just “science and tech are great” but “What’s this all about, anyhow?” The kids have to learn the core values and be able to discuss them intelligently with judges.

Every year there’s a real-world theme to the whole competition: this year’s is called “Food Factor” and it’s about food safety and contamination. Sophia’s team did a field trip to a sushi restaurant, to the middle school’s cafeteria, and to a local butcher’s shop to learn about food handling practices and concerns. Both kids’s teams came up with pretty cool real-world products (Simon’s team’s product is so cool I’m trying to talk the other families into doing a Kickstarter for it, but so far no takers).

Because the kids have to figure out how to program the robots and have to design the project and then present everything to judges, it’s really clear right away which kids have done the work and which had the adults doing the work for them. It does no good for adults to do the work (something I wish some parents at the kids’s schools would learn, SIGH), and one thing you learn right away is that these kids can do it. They might not do it well. They might not do it professionally. But man, some of these kids are amazing. (One kid on Sophia’s team was so into getting his robot to do its run correctly he worked in the basement of the team leader’s house for 4 hours on his own one night.) And if they’re not good at one thing (programming) they might be good at another (video editing).

This program is getting so popular several schools around us have FLL classes, with a teacher and all of last year’s Lego tools and lots of experience. These kids are well-taught and have great resources and are kicking our kids’s asses in the competitions. Both Simon and Sophia’s teams advanced in the first round, back in November, but I’m expecting both to get smoked in this coming round. (This isn’t just me; the other parents I’ve talked to feel the same way.) It’s like pickup teams facing the Yankees; of course the pickup teams have a chance.

If your kids are at all interested in science, technology, computers, robots, or Lego, and they’re between the ages of 9 and 14 (US/Canada/Mexico; 9 and 16 elsewhere, I guess), check it out. It will help you a lot if you can get people who’ve done it before involved, because for a newbie parent like me much of what was going on was baffling.

I’m one of the parent volunteers helping out with the 6th grade book club, which is part of Project Cornerstone, a YMCA-driven project in Santa Clara County not only to promote reading but to promote stories about values and questions kids might have. Project Cornerstone is really cool, and in middle school they create book clubs that offer lots of young adult novels with nary a vampire in sight.

This month’s book is The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. None of the kids has had a chance to read the book yet, so today we had a discussion of some of the background of the book, which concerns a young girl in Afghanistan who pretends to be a boy in order to support her family. Since we didn’t know anything about the book, we did some fun stuff, like marking off a 10-foot by 10-foot square in the middle of the carpeting to show the size of the place the protagonist lives in, and we discussed the subject matter.

This is what I learned:

• Some kids hadn’t heard of Afghanistan.
• None of them knew where it was, although Sophia came closest with “near India.”
• Some kids had heard the word “Taliban.” They didn’t know what it meant, though.
• A few knew there had been a war there recently. Even fewer knew that the US had been involved.
• A couple knew that the predominant religion there was Islam.
• Almost none of them knew anything about the conditions for women there.
• Almost all of them tried the hummus I made, and several tried the dried fruits that another mom brought.

We had a discussion about the title. None of the kids knew what the word “breadwinner” meant. We discussed why bread was slang for money, and why bread is so important. (I’m guessing not many of these kids have had to recite “Give us this day our daily bread” too often.)

I have no idea how atypical I was as a child (okay, okay: I was very atypical), but I watched the Evening News with Walter Cronkite every  night with my dad. I didn’t always understand what “Vietnam” or “energy crisis” or “M2″ meant, but I had some exposure to the news. A lot of these kids — from very well-informed, very successful families — are not getting this. I only point this out not to rag on these kids (they’re in 6th grade, after all) but to point out that it’s never too early to start talking to your kids about world events. Or to use big words like “breadwinner” with them. They were really, really interested! They want to know this stuff!

I have high hopes for book discussion next time.

The house we’re staying in is in the back of beyond. It’s so far off the beaten path, I can’t imagine what it must be like to live there full-time. The people who live here: Do they just surf all day? Are they artists? What’s their story?

Just sayin’: sometimes living sixty minutes outside of San Francisco feels like I live on the dark side of the moon. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live twenty minutes from the nearest town all the time.

We can see the stars here. There’s enough light pollution that we don’t see a huge sky full of the Milky Way. But we made out Orion and the Big Dipper.

As we were out walking the other night, Sophia said, “This is why they call it silver moonlight.”

I looked around, and indeed, everything was bathed in a bluish-silvery moonlight. Enough light to walk by, although I did step on a few rocks (it was an unpaved road, after all).

I wonder how many clichés (like “silver moonlight”) we’re going to rediscover. In a world where certain natural things have pretty much disappeared — the moon has never lighted anything in the Bay Area in my memory — it’s astonishing to run across the truth of old phrases I’ve certainly never thought twice about.

Got an unusual comment from Christina the other day:

You were a joy to read… before twitter. Now, not so much. Seriously, have you not better things to say?

Well, the Twitter is basically a way to have something to say, frankly. I suppose everyone who’d be interested in my tweets have probably added me to their own Twitter lists, so I could probably stop posting them here. (I’m DianePatterson on Twitter, btw, in case you’re looking for me.)

But to answer your question: at the moment I haven’t found a particular raison d’être for this blog. Many of the things I’d like to talk about really aren’t fair for me to talk about much (for instance: my kids—yeah, I know, I win some kind of Mom-points for finally figuring that out) and others are just…well…

There comes a time in every parent’s life where they realize they have lost control of their little kid. For me, this was when Sophia earned her purple belt in taekwando a few weeks ago.

  
“You want me to go to bed WHEN?”