I have a 3 year old daughter. She is a challenge to raise but she always makes me proud. My time with her is very limited but since day zero I do my best in making our time together as positive as possible. I dont want to be the pressurising parent that obsesses about making a clone of theirs but I truly believe that problem solving skills can be developed from a very young age. So I did my research and came with a way to teach my daughter programming using lego bricks.
The target
Model core mathematical functions and basic algebra using lego bricks
Time period
2 years
Facts
3 year old daughter
Unlimited supply of simple lego bricks (child friendly)
The girl knows numeric representation up to 10 and she can count objects and identify basic colours and shapes.
How I started.
I sat down with her and build walls with the lego bricks. I use a variety of techniques and told her to throw them to see how the break. Eventually she could identify the strongest and would do it from scratch.
Last summer she started drawing (vaguely) shapes using pen and paper.
Today I told her to make a triangle using her legos. I left her alone and I observed from a distance. She was just making random shapes and I thought “ok maybe I m aiming too high here”
I eventually hear her shouting “triangle, triangle”. I maybe parent blind (Failing to observe the truth because I am a parent) but I am very proud of the result.
Notice the bottom layer. She made the triangle but it wouldn’t hold itself together. She could just call me at that stage but all those construction lessons paid off.
Next steps
Tomorrow I will give her two pixel bricks only and see how she handles that.
I will then follow with colour limitations and then introduce the notion of lengths of sides.
After going through all the shapes I believe we will have a substantial way of explaining a problem so that she can go ahead and try to solve it.
