Ask HN: How Would You Explain HN to a Two-Year-Old? I was on HN this morning and my 2 yr. old son asked me "What's that orange thing papa's looking at?" I answered "It's a place where people can talk to each other about things they find interesting." He didn't get it, which makes sense since it isn't really a "place" and there are no visible "people" here. So I figured I would propose it to you all, how would you explain HN to a 2 year old? |
No need to overthink this. Kid just wanted your attention.
I consider curiosity in a child to be a valuable resource to nurture. If you make it a positive experience for the child, he'll want to do it again. Careful not to appear annoyed, because then, as it resulted in a negative experience, the child will know to avoid doing such things in the future.
Making them associate that behavior of curiosity with having a positive experience is what I consider to be important here.
Plus, you also get to flex those brain muscles. Even if nothing seems to stick now, I imagine it does help them learn in the long-run.
On the other hand, when the cause/effect is behind the scenes, not tangible, simple explanations end up leading him down a (funny) road of misunderstandings. I was trying to explain to him the idea of place values when reading numbers, which is surprisingly hard to explain short of memorizing numbers. He came up with some great questions, all of which indicated he was on a totally different page.
I especially like those 10x10 abacuses that have 5 beads in one color and 5 beads in another color, switching the order after 5 lines. I got this one for my cousin:
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-10-Row-Rekenrek-Co...
It helps in visualizing a 1 digit number in more digestible pieces to help working with it in one's head.
Another idea is to use money to emphasize the "worth" of each place value. For example, the first place value could represent pennies, the second dimes, and the third dollars, so each is worth 10 of the place/digit on the right. You can say that it's inconvenient to hold a lot of currency tokens. Why carry 100 pennies or 10 dimes when you can carry a dollar? So, making a number is like reducing the amount of coins or cash notes we carry for the same amount of money.
Yet another idea is to simply show him a giant list of numbers and explaining the patterns in the sequence.
Looks to me like the two-year-old is the one explaining it to you.
This opens up a bridge to him asking, “what’s the internet?” To which you now have endless possibilities on introducing your son to the wonderful world of technology :)
Not sure where I would start other than "daddy reading".
I remember when my son was little having him help me pull ethernet cable through our roofspace ceiling. As the cable kept coming through the hole in the ceiling as he pulled he shouted up to me, “Dad, is this magic?” :-)
"HN is like daycare for me! I come here to read stories and talk to my friends, but my friends live all over the world."
My kid is a few months shy of 3 and I don’t think there’s anything of value to tell him about the internet at this point. Once he can read I’ll probably explain more to him.
I'm not sure I could get into much more detail than that, perhaps a library metaphor?
If a 2 year old is interested in HN, it might be because he/she is trying to see what's more interesting than them.
Under each posting, which are articles (shared information) not solicitations (asking to buy or sell services), people are having conversations.
You could give the example of people leaving post-it notes for each other.
Children at this age ask "why" questions often in rapid succession. I am not sure it actually matters what the "best answer" is. What is likely important to him is that you are engaging with him.
What happened?
Keep your vocab limited when explaining to kids. Otherwise you'll go down a rabbit hole of "what does that mean". Which is fine if you want to do that, but a 2 year old isn't going to remember a lot of it.