This is amazing and looks fun! I immediately paid to support the project, so I can play the toy later.
That said, I wonder if it will really make learning circuit easier. I have a hard time imagining that kids would give up learning circuit just because they couldn't get the abstractions. The biggest obstacle to learning, per my limited observation of course, is always lack of innate curiosity or sometimes talent. Those who get discouraged by the so-called difficult abstraction probably do not need to learn circuitry in the first place.
By the way, I find the promotional video interesting. There are a few frames that talk about how a kid had to resort to maths and what not to understand circuits, and videos showed kids checking out oscilloscopes, square waves, some complex circuits that looked like Y-delta transforms, and voltage-ampere curves (or something like that). I mean, if a kid would look into those things, why would we worry that the kid can't learn circuit? And since when looking into math is a bad thing?
Boswell's idea seems aligned with the movement of progressive math education in the US, which advocates that there's gotta be an easy and intuitive way to motivate and enable every kid to discover and grasp math concepts. I think it's a noble goal. I'm just not sure if everyone is born with the drive or aptitude.
I teach and from my experience drive and aptitude is not the problem. "Math" and "abstraction" are not the problem either, except that for many educators they are synonymous with rote memorization which leads to ridiculous amounts of math phobia in the US that I have not seen in Europe.
When you hear people avoiding math in teaching, they usually mean avoiding the rote "non beautiful" perversion of math frequently presented by educators with limited math experience.
That said, I wonder if it will really make learning circuit easier. I have a hard time imagining that kids would give up learning circuit just because they couldn't get the abstractions. The biggest obstacle to learning, per my limited observation of course, is always lack of innate curiosity or sometimes talent. Those who get discouraged by the so-called difficult abstraction probably do not need to learn circuitry in the first place.
By the way, I find the promotional video interesting. There are a few frames that talk about how a kid had to resort to maths and what not to understand circuits, and videos showed kids checking out oscilloscopes, square waves, some complex circuits that looked like Y-delta transforms, and voltage-ampere curves (or something like that). I mean, if a kid would look into those things, why would we worry that the kid can't learn circuit? And since when looking into math is a bad thing?
Boswell's idea seems aligned with the movement of progressive math education in the US, which advocates that there's gotta be an easy and intuitive way to motivate and enable every kid to discover and grasp math concepts. I think it's a noble goal. I'm just not sure if everyone is born with the drive or aptitude.