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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!
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