#41 For All Ages

For All Ages

Grown-ups: Help children stay consistent with their machine’s rules. Use spreadsheets: program a formula you or older kids invent, hide the formula, let others guess the formula from inputs and outputs. Help children organize scavenger hunts for functions in stories or everyday surroundings.

Babies: Use qualitative functions – that is, machines that work without numbers. How about a machine that adds a sticker to each toy thrown into it by a baby, or a machine that finds each baby animal’s mommy?

Toddlers and Young Kids: Invite toddlers to change the first object and then repeat that same operation on other objects. For example, give each toy animal its favorite food (dog-bone, bird-seed, rabbit-carrot). Use simple quantitative functions such as the machine doubling whatever enters into it, or giving every character two raisins to eat. So, if several enter, you need to prepare enough raisins.

Big Kids: Kids enjoy making up fancy machines that are hard to guess. Once you have the game going, you can play it in the car or on walks for some oral computations. Kids may argue whether the guess, “The machine doubles,” is correct about their “Add the number to itself” function – help them figure out what’s going on!