Learning Technology is The Key to Our Future

I LOVE homeschooling my kids when we get to do pretty neat things and count it as part of their school work. It’s one of the many advantages to homeschooling them. This past Saturday our local library held a Robotics Educational event put on by our local college O-C Tech. I honestly was expecting to see a bit more than what they showed us, but given Jimmy’s love of all things math and science related I knew he’d soak it all up. I didn’t expect Delbert and Zeva to get engrossed in the information too, but they did.

The crew from O-C Tech brought two different types of robots. One was a simple loading machine, and the other was an interactive robot that does many different things similar to a human’s interaction. I expected my kids to be only interested in the one that could dance and talk with them. Boy was I wrong, they all gravitated towards the one that they could see benefiting “our family pallet business.”

My little men put the presenters through the ringer with questions and asking them to change the settings so they could see everything the simple machine could do. They were watching with great intensity as they changed the settings on the computer. They saw the value in having a machine like that made. I was pretty proud of my kids at that moment.

I had to pull them to check out the other robot and its dancing stunts. I captured it on video because I thought it was cool. I like the idea of having a robot as a friend. Maybe that stems from me being lonely as a child and only playing with animals as I was growing up, but I liked how it could talk and have “fun” with you too.

The Future Use of Technology

My kids were quick to inform me that the only good thing that the robot could do was “help a person be lazier.” That made me laugh because the reality is at this point in the game they are right. There are many movies that show that robots are being made to help protect us and fight our battles for us versus having people lose their lives for us to maintain our freedoms. I honestly believe in due time that day will come for sure.

I also feel that if my kids get on the technology bandwagon now, then they are going to be at a stronger advantage compared to others. Robots/machines are going to be replacing many jobs within our world. However, there is always going to be a need for someone to operate them and also fix them. I feel it’s important that we teach our kids to be able to do those kinds of skills.

My kids already learn many aspects of operating a blog from writing, web design, and marketing across the web. I feel those skills are going to be the ones that they are going to need in our future. If I can help them learn even more skills in relation to computers and technology I will. Ironically, Del is the reason I learned about computers so early on in life because he pushed me into keyboarding class and computers 101. He saw where our world was headed before I did.

What skills are you ensuring your kids learn now to prepare them for the future?