One of the things I strive to instill in my children is that learning is a lifelong endeavor.  We will always have things to learn (no one knows everything!).  In fact, I often remind them, the more we learn, the more we realize we don’t know.  Learning not only teaches us, it helps to ask more and better questions. 

So many people in our culture see admitting that they don’t know something as a sign of weakness.  Instead, I want my boys to see the ability to say, “I don’t know.  Can you teach me?” as a fun jumping off point for a new adventure.  And part of how I try to teach this is through modeling this behavior myself.

We’re reaching the point where my 9-year-old’s knowledge in some areas is starting to eclipse my own.  One of these areas is in the building and programming of robots.  He’s now using Lego Mindstorms EV3 as well as Lego’s Simple and Powered Machines kits to motorize and sequence through programming his Lego creations.  It’s been fun to hear him talking about gear ratios, the required pneumatic pressure, coding his motor sequences and durations, and so on.

The other week I had the opportunity to take a robotics course geared at educators.  (Yes, some courses will allow homeschooling parents to join, though in this particular instance I think my background and degree helped the organizers to see me as a serious candidate.)  During this class, I built and learned the basics of programming a Parallax ActivityBot 360.

It was a great introduction to robotics programming for me.  It encouraged me to learn something new that was outside of my general scope of interests.  And, it gave me knowledge so I could go back and engage with my child in working together on something that’s currently captivated his interests.

I’m excited to have something we can learn together.  In that sense, because we’ll both be engaged in figuring out how to program our robot, it feels different than my learning to play the didgeridoo, another one of my recent forays into learning something new (see HERE).  And my 9-year-old is excited to be able to teach his mama something about programming, an area where he currently has the greater knowledge base.  I call it a winning proposition all around.

Do you engage in learning new things with your kids?  What sort of things have you learned together?