Think outside the box

I think that it's more effective to show rather than tell someone how to think outside the box. I am no expert, but I will share what do with my children. We take frequent long road trips, so to entertain my kids I made up a game called 'what, why, how, when, where, and who'. Each person takes turn to ask a question about anything. If I don't know the answer, they would get a point. When I ask a question and they know the answer, they would also get a point. They asked questions such as 'why is the sky blue, why is the grass green, how is the car moving on the road, why is inside the car hotter than outside, why road noise sounds different on different surfaces, how we see the car in front of us, how is sound traveled from there to here, etc, things they wondered about when they looked out the window. The objective of the game was to stimulate their curiosity and be aware of their surroundings. Pushing their own boundaries, hopefully they would get a to the limit of our knowledge (or mine). I was amazed a few occasions. For example, one time I asked, 'is there a limit to how fast our van could go, if it's engine is infinitely powerful?' My 7yo answered first, 'yes, because the speedometer only goes up to 160!', she said. My 11yo son said, 'I think yes, because of terminal velocity.' I asked him to explain his answer. He said, 'well, we are not driving in vacuum, we are pushing a hole in air, the faster we go the denser the air and eventually it would become a solid that we can't go any faster. Similar to the terminal velocity of an object falling to earth.' I was so impressed that I gave him 10 points instead of one. To me that's thinking outside the box, thinking about something that he had never thought about before and created new knowledge for himself. In the lab, we do that with every piece of new data we get. Even when the datum falls inside the box, we would still consider an outside possibility also. -Quyen Hoang-