This. The ability to try things out and fail. Then you might need to fail some more, ask someone a fraction of your age for help, and try it again. THAT's what makes someone tech savvy-- actually that's what makes someone a learner. If you put a set of K'nex in front of me WITH the step-by-step directions, and I will have the thing built by, oh, Y3K. That same set, in the hands of a former former fifth grader who read on a first grade level-- he had that thing built in 10 minutes flat with an itemized list of the pieces I was missing.
Forgive my harsh words (
and this word is one of my LEAST favorites), but at the recent BEST conference, we teachers joked that we all suck at something-- and we need to embrace our suckiness and ask for help in order to overcome it. Kids need to know that it's okay to suck at things, and it's okay to
admit that you suck. That's how we know what we need to learn.
Rock on, Grandma.
