When your kids opt for STEM education, what can differentiate your kids from the rest is the perspective they apply to find solutions to STEM problems.
While some kids will apply an analytical framework to solve problems, others might have an idealistic approach in which they solve issues from a set of principles and values that are typically religious or political.
However, another effective way to solve problems in STEM fields, coding for kids and robotics for kids is Intuition. When your kid resorts to intuition or judgement, they approach problem-solving from a pragmatic or practical standpoint, placing emphasis on the achievable solutions.
The Intuitive Thought Process
The vast majority of our decisions and behaviours are driven by intuitive cognition. The majority of our mental existence is rather simple. The ease with which ideas are accessible and have an effect is a defining characteristic of intuition.
Our capacity to prevent mistakes hugely depends on what comes to mind and how often the right notion comes to mind. Intuition refers to arriving at conclusions or making decisions instantly as opposed to “reasoning,” which involves a series of procedures.
We don’t always employ all the information at our disposal when we think, and this is especially true with intuition. Perceptual tasks like seeing and hearing are comparable to intuitive actions. And while part of our intuition is accurate, some of it is not. One of the distinguishing characteristics of intuitive impressions is that they arise spontaneously and without any goal of being confrontational.
Experts have intuitions that enable them to act quickly and decisively in situations that would appear to need substantial thought, such as when executing a fast chess move or deciding whether to purchase and sell stocks.
Persons with skilled intuition rarely consciously choose their course of action. instead, they act as though it were the only rational response to the given situation. They seem to react occasionally spontaneously since they have a vast amount of pertinent knowledge and a wealth of experience.
Intuition in Kids
For kids relying only on experience may not work. Your kid will only gain basic information and experience unless specific conditions are met, such as continuous practise and prompt feedback, which might result in misconceptions and overconfidence.
The level of confidence your kid may possess is not a reliable indicator of how accurate they are because there is a lot of self-reliance present along with poor accuracy. Overconfidence is made worse by people’s inability to learn from their errors.
For instance, when there is no traffic, we may decide it is safe to cross the street, but this decision also entails the conviction that we won’t be hit by any cars. This illustration makes the impact of experience quite obvious. Compared to older people, young children are significantly less likely to be aware of the threat posed by approaching vehicles.
Trial and Error
Trial and error is the process of trying out several approaches and identifying and removing mistakes or factors that led to failure in order to find the best way to arrive at the best answer.
The fundamental strategy is to analyse the issue and test every possible solution. Try another approach if the previous one does not work, and so on, until you either find a solution or become weary and go on to something else.
Because it is straightforward and comes before more profound reasoning, it would seem that this method of problem resolution is ingrained in our genetic makeup and is therefore a product of thousands of years of evolutionary development.
We all use it occasionally, especially when we are presented with a novel circumstance that we do not fully comprehend and for which we are unable to access a plan from our long-term memory.
Responsible Thinking
Intuition must be used responsibly as it may not lead to accurate results all the time. The goal of responsible thinking is to identify instances in which intuitive assumptions may be incorrect. They frequently contain errors for a variety of reasons, such as the following:
1. Inaccurate, Insufficient, and Flawed Information.
2. Resolving issues with incomplete, unreliable, and inaccurate information too quickly.
3. Insufficient underpinning mental structures.
4. Short-term emotional bias; judgements made by experts are nonetheless affected by unrelated or irrelevant emotions at the time.
5. Fewer alternatives will be considered because intuition is based on pattern recognition and will favour solutions that in the past, have worked well with the current perceived pattern. This will prevent sufficient consideration of new options, especially when dealing with novel situations that might call for a novel or unique solutions.
6. Prejudices can cause imperfect experiences to take precedence over reliable facts and evidence and help shape our intuition.
7. Inappropriate application of solutions resulting from applying expertise and intuition in an area into another lesser-known and unfamiliar area.
When to Trial and Error
It’s important to know in which situation it is good for your kid to adopt trial and error and intuition. Using it at the wrong place can create more problems than it can solve. Trial and error work best when there are several opportunities to find the right answer and little time is at stake. It is not a good approach for issues where there are few opportunities to find a solution.
Diffusing a bomb, operating on a patient, or operating an automobile are a few examples of scenarios in which you wouldn’t want to employ trial and error. Making a mistake in these circumstances might spell disaster.
You wouldn’t visit a dentist who relies on trial and error to fix your tooth issues. The best scenarios for using trial and error are those that give you plenty of time and safety to find a solution.
Gaining information through trial and error is sometimes a smart idea. When using the trial-and-error approach, a person will test a concept to see if it offers a viable answer. If not, they try a different approach. If the technique is successful, the user will have found the right answer to their issue.
Finding out why an issue was solved is not the point of trial and error. It is employed to address the issue. While trial and error is often the best way to solve mechanical or technical problems, it may not be the best approach in some industries where it is necessary to demonstrate an understanding of “why” a solution works.
It is neither a strategy for discovering the best answer nor a way for discovering every answer. It is a method of problem-solving that is only employed to locate a solution. The fact that this method doesn’t necessitate a lot of knowledge from your child is one of its most intriguing benefits. It may need a lot of patience.
