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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3615 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 26, 2025

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Do people have advice for enriching online curriculum for a gifted autistic 8-year-old?

My son was kicked out of our local private school after less than a term for being too autistic for them to handle, and we have finally had to pull him from the local state school because the SEN support he had in place wasn't working this year. So we (mostly my wife - I work a City professional job) are now homeschooling an autistic 8-year-old mini-STEMlord. We started using Doodle Learning which is based on the English National Curriculum - after entry assessments he is within months of being ready for secondary maths (i.e. roughly 3 years ahead) and 1.5-2.5 years ahead in English. When he started school, his non-verbal IQ was assessed at 99.9th percentile.

He enjoys the Doodle Maths online exercises, but refuses to do the English ones unless paid. My memory, and as far as I can determine online, is that if you are more than 1-2 years ahead in maths you need enrichment (more conceptually difficult work and problems that require deeper thinking) rather than acceleration (going through the standard curriculum faster). The UK has a good system of maths enrichment for secondary schools organised around a tiered set of competitions leading up to the IMO, but I am not aware of anything for primary.

More broadly, my son has engineer-brain, which is close to my scientist-brain, but different enough that I don't know how to motivate him or get him to build things more complex than Lego. Do people here have advice? He loved forest nursery when he was little, and built things that a 4-year-old shouldn't be able to build. He has stopped since then.

Sorry to hear about your son’s school. What about BRIO train track sets, the wooden ones? I used to have a lot of fun with those: you can build arbitrary systems on the large scale, but the nature of curving track constrains what you can do on the small scale in a way he might find interesting and challenging. Also they’re big wooden pieces so harder to swallow or lose than Lego, and hard to damage. And the scenery allows some level of imagination / artistic expression.

My parents have BRIO train at their house. Mini-STEMlord loved it when he was younger but has mostly outgrown it. It remains the highlight of little brother's visits there though. (They have the adapter kit which allows you to do the heavy civil engineering in Duplo and then run BRIO track across it.)

Sorry, somehow I got it into my head that he was 4. What about moving onto the real thing? Or if I you don’t want him to turn into a train otaku, there’s the Lego Mindstorms kits, which have a very good reputation (actual robotics departments often use them for student projects).

There’s also Warhammer if you feel like that City job is burdening you with too much money, or you could move him onto making actual stuff. For example simple carpentry with supervision, or get a 3D printer and an ONSHAPE subscription and let him learn easy CAD stuff. (Prusa is good but costs $999 for an assembler printer so it’s a Christmas+Birthday deal).

Mini STEMlord's mum here. I'll look into Lego SPIKE, but it's super-expensive and he's already bankrupting me by building 2,000-piece Lego sets in a matter of hours! I've got an Arduino starter kit, which I originally bought for myself but didn't use, so I'm going to work with him on that.

My mum's just bought him/us a Bambu Lab P1S. We're not at the point of doing CAD work yet. We're still working on 'how to choose and print your own project from your laptop (without your mum's help)'. Thanks for the recommendation of ONSHAPE, though. I figured a CAD package would be expensive, but ONSHAPE looks like it's free for home/educational users.

Mini STEMlord gravitates towards sci-fi horror (terrifyingly, as he's only eight) and loves complex board games, so I've been trying to get him interested in Warhammer 40k, mostly as an excuse to build the Adeptus Mechanicus army of my dreams... But, he's not really gone for the (family-friendly) snippets I've shown him so far yet. Maybe as he gets older...

I second the choice of OnShape! Yes, it's free for educational purposes. I volunteer at a local after-school STEM program, and we have elementary-school kids CAD designs for 3D printers.

OnShape looks a bit intimidating at first (it wasn't UX-ed to death), but there are lots of videos on YouTube that do a how-to. Get to the point where you can make a "Sketch" of something simple like a polygon, and then "Extrude" it, and you're on your way to make interesting designs. In my experience, so long as the kid is coordinated enough to use a mouse, he'll get comfy with the basics faster than an adult.

Best of luck!

Yeah, sorry, the stuff that sticks in my mind 20 years later are all kind of expensive options. Mostly I just used to read books, which are cheap. If you can get him onto something that uses raw materials like whittling or something rather than expensive electronics kits, that would help a lot. Even silver-smithing is pretty cheap as long as you stick to wire and semi-precious stones, though I doubt you have the space.

ONSHAPE is great and I have never ever used the free account to do semi-professional work.

EDIT: the lego sets are probably a bad idea, you want their make-anything kits rather than sets that can be finished.

EDIT EDIT: try those "101 Things A Boy Can Do" books from the 1930s for cheaper ideas.

I don't know how to motivate him or get him to build things more complex than Lego.

What's your goal for him wrt this? Does he share it?

But just taking this at face value. Have you tried an erector set? A 3d printer? Electronics? Model kits (cars, planes, boats, Gundam)? Combining all of the above...

I'm the mini-STEMlord's (love that, @MadMonzer) mum.

His nanna has treated us to a Bambu Lab 3D printer. He says he's always wanted a 3D printer since he knew what one was, and enjoys sitting in front of it, watching it print. He likes Snap Circuits, but he can do all the projects instantly (and free-build), so I'm going to learn Arduino with him - I'd previously bought an Arduino kit to use myself.

He's bought glueable model kits while on trips, but they've never really taken off with him.

Yeah I would guess snap circuits are too basic for him. My daughter enjoyed them when she was little but she was soldering and building things out on bread boards by the time she was 7-8. (My husband really wanted her to love electronics, but they are a means to an end for her. Give her el wire and suggest blinging out her ukulele? Absolutely! Make a doorbell for her room? Nahhh.) Arduino (and more modern incarnations) can be great. And let him do both electronics and programming.

If you think he might like tabletop gaming 3d printers can be a nice way to get a custom set of miniatures. The son of a friend uses his 3d printer to make bits and pieces for his rc car.

And depending on what's available and whether he wants to deal with people, FIRST Lego league can be fun. My daughter did it with the girl scouts.

There are so many cool things accessible to kids these days, especially if their folks have some extra money (so blowing out some LEDs with poorly designed circuits isn't a big deal).

What characteristics distinguish your definitions of "engineer-brain" and "scientist-brain"?

My son was kicked out of our local private school after less than a term for being too autistic for them to handle

Too autistic in what sense? Disruptive? Violent? Loud? Just weird? I often think the best thing in these circumstances is to go all in on social skills and making friends. After all, there is no raw IQ test your son will have significant issue with in life. There are plenty of 99.9 percentile IQ but low agreeableness people who kind of fail in life, or who max out as poor researchers or people doing a dull job far beneath their station. They don’t all become quants (who are often actually pretty “normie” / neurotypical in my experience). Many struggle socially, with the opposite sex, have few friends. I’m not saying, of course, that any of this applies or would apply in your son’s case.

But you take a 99.9th percentile geek and give them even 80th percentile social skills, charisma, agreeableness, and the world is their oyster (and not just professionally, either). I don’t know why your son was kicked out of school, but it seems to me that it might be most effective to focus on that before you try to teach your already very smart kid more (likely redundant) math.

Mini STEMlord's mum here. He's got severe SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder), which gets dramatically worse when he's even slightly ill, and this causes violent fight/flight meltdowns in response to light/noise. The local state school/council paid for a support worker to remove him from class if he looked like he might melt down.

If he's in a forest or some similar low-overwhelm environment, his only problem is a tendency to monologue. By the time he left school, he was being 'corridor educated' by the support worker, doing work far below his abilities, and had started developing a bad case of 'smartest guy in the room' syndrome. He told me, with puckish malice, that he'd "rated [his support worker's] intelligence as a fraction, 16/256".

He's just started a day-a-week forest school where most of the kids seem to be academically gifted and autistic, and he had a fascinating too-and-fro with another kid who gave him as good as he sent. So, hopefully, that will be good for him!!! :)

Seconding that the best thing to teach would be social skills, i.e. compassion for others. I should hope you gently admonished his comment sbout the social worker.

Encouraging any more STEM studies would only further his descent into the antisocial, half-clever asshole life.

Just to be clear, here, autistic doesn't equal poor social skills.

There are a lot of actually autistic people (stereotypically women) who never get diagnosed because they're people-pleasing social chameleons, at great cost to their mental health. Mini STEMlord's little bro is also diagnosed autistic and has a thousand-watt smile plus the personality to sell ice to Inuits.

Mini STEMlord just needs the right peer group. The danger - autistic or not - is where someone gets to adulthood always having been 'the gifted kid' and 'the smartest guy in the room' but they're not in the wider scheme of things, and they can't cope when they realise. I suspect it's easier to fix that in home ed, than it is in a classroom (unless it's an uber-selective school).

Even outside selective schools, I think scholastic competitions are a good way to cut a precocious snot down to size (speaking as a precocious snot). I managed to pull off 1st in my (small) state in MathCounts when I was little, but then I went to nationals and didn't even make it to the Countdown round...

It might be necessary to do things like that regularly, though. I didn't join any other national competitions in grade school, and so I was still a bit blindsided when I went to a good college and wasn't ever the smartest in the room anymore and had to actually study to learn everything and barely even kept my fall freshman GPA at a B average. I'm encouraging my kids to do AMC now, in part because it would be great if they make it to the higher levels there, but in part to keep them reminded that there's a wide world out there and they're not even close to being the only precocious kids in it. They're not snots about it, but they do aspire to good colleges and I don't want it to be a surprise if they get to one and suddenly being exceptionally smart is just table stakes.

You might be right that home education makes things easier to fix. I raced ahead in math when I was little and could teach myself the basics, but eventually I got on the Algebra-I-and-onward track and it was easy to just take one-class-per-year, smugly feeling smart because I was much younger than my classmates but not actually learning any faster than them. Without that fixed class schedule I could have tried to keep going a bit faster and that might have been enough challenge to make things difficult and keep me humble.

Try https://mathacademy.com/ ? I'd guess that the enrichment vs acceleration concern has more to do with classroom management than the best interests of a given student.

It's legit, it even got someone like me hooked

I was a gifted maths student as well (unsurprisingly, given that IQ is 70% genetic in the top half of the distribution) and I definitely benefitted from enrichment over acceleration. The kind of superficial understanding of calculus available to a 75th percentile 16 year old or a 99.9th percentile 11 year old just isn't that valuable. (I learnt calculus again at 13 in what was technically a regular classroom, although it was the top set an a selective private school, and that time it took).

The kind of superficial understanding of calculus available to a 75th percentile 16 year old or a 99.9th percentile 11 year old just isn't that valuable.

I eventually got my Applied Math PhD and became the sort of Math Snob Connoisseur who insists that it's not real calculus until you at least throw away that Riemann crap and use Lebesgue integrals ... but I have to admit there's a ton of students who will do science or engineering or medicine where they would greatly benefit from solidly understanding "superficial" Calculus. If you never quite grokked delta-epsilon proofs, but you understood numerical integration well enough that you could have properly reviewed the discovery of "Tai's Method", that's a better understanding of calculus than at least that medical journal (and that author, and some of her collaborators) had at that time.

For either acceleration or enrichment, though, it needs to be periodically reinforced to be worthwhile, and that can be the tricky part. I took an Algebraic Topology class for fun as a college MechE-but-advanced-at-math, was amused by simplicial complexes and exact sequences and so forth but couldn't see what any of it was really useful for, promptly forgot it all because I never used it for anything for a couple years ... and then ended up in a math PhD program where I had to relearn a chunk of it just to understand some of the best visiting lecturers. I assume Mary Tai was the same way: nobody ends up in medical research without taking at least Calc 1, and if she was smart enough to reinvent the trapezoidal rule then she was surely smart enough to understand it as it was taught in Calc 1, but she probably never used it again for years and so had completely forgotten it when she needed it. Being able to rederive ideas you forget is IMHO one of the nicest aspects of math, but it is better to have a fuller toolbox of things you don't have to reinvent, and the more "enrichment" you get, the more connections you can make between ideas, and the easier it is to remember long-unused ideas via their more-obscure connections to more recently used ideas. With narrow acceleration in one subject, you might get so far ahead there that you don't get the same reinforcement schedule that other kids get via the usual connections to other subjects.

Learning on your own makes it a little easier to get some of that reinforcement from "standard" curriculum material, though. A standard high school Physics class won't be based on calculus, because most of the kids who want to take it won't have learned calculus yet, but if you know you're not most kids and you've got basic Calc 1 under your belt then you can just study calculus-based Physics instead, getting in more science and reinforcing math skills (and getting what I'm told is an impressive AP credit) at the same time, and learning something that's still on the critical path for a lot more science+engineering career tracks than e.g. group theory would have been.

Khan Academy is also good for acceleration, to a sufficiently self-motivated kid.

And you're right, the trouble with acceleration in general is all about the difficulty of teaching 15 kids to potentially 15 different levels at once. With enrichment you can teach the whole class the basics, then teach the quicker half of them "enrichment" extras while the slower half drills the basics into place, then teach the whole class the basics of the next standard material ... but if you instead accelerated the quicker half of the class straight into the basics of the next standard material, then you're stuck, aren't you? You've now got two separate classes, with nothing that you can teach them both at the same time, not if you're relying on a 15:1 student:teacher ratio rather than a 1:1 student:computer ratio.

All that said, there's lots of valuable things you can teach kids, even in mathematics, that would count as "enrichment" rather than "acceleration" vs a typical "get them the standard high school diploma" curriculum. Most of them that come to mind for me are somewhat impractical, aimed at mathematician-brained rather than engineer-brained kids (I guess the standard curriculum is standard for a reason?), but Boolean logic might be a good choice and can be taught from scratch, and vector geometry is IMHO simpler and more practical than a typical high school geometry class despite having little in the way of prerequisites.

I'd suggest @MadMonzer focus on the ways to build things that get gradually more complex than Lego. Technics vs regular Lego, perhaps, or 3D printing with a simple CAD tool for design? Perhaps programming? Even with nothing physical to it, writing a simple little game scratches that same "I built something" itch, and you can get a Pi or Arduino or whatever to add physicality.

And if you lump the fast students in with the slow students from the next year up, that still doesn't work well to sync the curricula, as now you have a classroom with two groups of people who vary quite dramatically in how quickly and readily they learn the subject.

Kordemsky’s Moscow Puzzles are a nice supplementary resource. Maybe Art of Problem Solving prealgebra.

Beast Academy -- made by the Art of Problem Solving team -- might be challenging enough, and has a great online program. It's focused on elmentary-levle math but truly deep, wihch sounds like what OP is looking for.

https://mathpickle.com/ is a wonderful treasury of puzzles that will induce kids to think deeply on problems. Not an online program, rather an intro to puzzles to complete in meatworld. Probably better in groups but I do some of the puzzles 1-on-1 with my gifted 8yo.

Thanks :) We were already looking at Beast Academy, but I've added Math Pickle!

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