History is full of examples of people who thought that how things were was how they always must be. Consider these fixed mindsets from the past: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” […]
Have you ever wondered how potato chips are made? Sure, you slice a potato and fry it. That’s an easy one. But how about pretzels? Or tea? Guitars? Motorcycles? Crayons? Baseball bats? They’re all made the same way: in a factory. Last year one of my friends took her family on a factory-and-museum road trip up the east coast. […]
As a dedicated prankster in my youth, I made sure to plan my April Fools’ pranks weeks in advance. Setting my siblings’ alarms for 3:30 AM? Totally. Flour in the hairdryer? Old hat. Wearing…clothing backwards? Yep, I was that kid. Eventually, I grew out of the dime-store pranks and settled into online trickery for my […]
Every once in a while, I’m stopped in my tracks while working or surfing online and I say to myself, “My kids have got to see this.” Something about the wonder of a video, the mind-blowing beauty of an image or sound, or the sheer coolness of a fact or graphic drives me to want […]
When one of my children comes to me with the inevitable, “Mom, I’m booored”, one of my go-to suggestions is, “Go build something.” When I say this, I’m thinking inside the box: blocks. Or Legos. Tower…maybe a house. This is as far as my multi-tasking mom brain goes. But when a child hears “build”, to […]
Sometimes we all need a jump start. A leap into the right direction, or any direction at all. That’s just where I was when I came across a mystical little book enticingly titled “How to Be an Explorer of the World.” Big promises, right? I was skeptical myself…and then I looked inside. The word “book” […]
What did those mysterious letters with the colons mean? Where was the rose bush that was hiding the Globe of Magellan, and how was the mystery ultimately solved? The riddle that launched the inaugural season of Brain Chase was made up of five different types of clues: hidden pictures, clusters of numbers, […]
Last weekend, my six year old and eight year old both wanted to play a board game with me. In our house, the three of us playing a board game is kind of a conundrum because my oldest desires to play more sophisticated games like Clue or Stratego while my younger daughter would rather play […]
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, there is an interesting exchange between Alice and the Red Queen while the two run in a race against each other. Alice, slightly frustrated that they are running but appear to be going nowhere says, “Well, in our country, you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very […]
At my children’s school, the teachers send out a weekly newsletter which details the lesson plans for the week. Over the last nine months, these newsletters have been focused on learning modules like multiplication tables and spelling tests. However, for the last week of school, the newsletter was slightly different. Since the teachers and classes […]