Curious Parents Class Resources

Kids Assume Success
Publisher’s Note

By John Piccone

Do you ever notice how as adults we tend to assume that anything new or novel will be difficult or impossible?  It seems that in the process of becoming adults, we’re trained to see mainly the obstacles and possibilities for failure when contemplating a new project, idea or venture.  Not so with kids – they have very little experience with failure and rejection and just naturally assume that anything is possible.  Kids assume that they’re capable of accomplishing anything, acquiring any skill or talent necessary to fulfill their desires.

I have the privilege of working with two teams of fifth graders at my son Newton’s school (Good Counsel School), who invented and designed toys for the Sally Ride Toy Challenge.  The Sally Ride Toy Challenge is a national competition co-sponsored by Sally Ride Science, Sigma Xi (the Science Research Society), Smith College and Hasbro.  The Toy Challenge is designed to inspire children in fifth through eighth grade, especially girls, to become interested in science and engineering by direct experience with a design project.  Three teams from Newt’s school will be proceeding to the national competition in North Carolina in May. 

I have had tremendous fun working with these kids and I have learned more about the unlimited potential of children and the artificial limits that adults place on themselves than through anything else I have done before.  Ask an adult whether they could invent, design and build a toy (or anything else for that matter), and you get lots of hedging.  Ask a group of fifth graders and they’ll give you a list of 50 possible inventions, draw detailed pictures of each one and tell you exactly how and what they would use to build them.  The fifth graders came up with ideas from anti-gravity hover shoes to robot jump rope turners.  They finally submitted designs for musical dominoes, laughing dodge balls and a swimming pool activity game.  The kids are in the process now of building their prototypes so they can demonstrate their toys at the national competition in North Carolina.

The kids have demonstrated the ability to assimilate engineering principles and subject matter such using pressure sensors or accelerometers to detect the tipping of a domino or bouncing of a dodge ball.  More amazing though is their ability to recognize that they won’t have all the answers at the beginning of a creative project.  The kids are comfortable not knowing what the solution will be and have faith that the process will yield the answers as they go along.  They show amazing intellectual agility as they negotiate the obstacles and challenges along the way.

In the process of working together, the three groups of fifth graders have developed individual and distinct team identities and team behaviors have emerged.  The kids have the level of insight required to notice that they’ve become teams and are capable of articulating the specific experiences that evoked the team behaviors. 

At the end of it all, win or lose, the kids will have experienced the thrill of taking an idea and making it a tangible reality.  How wonderful would it be if all children could be confident in their ability to make their dreams real?

John Piccone is the publisher of Curious Parents