Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, is a rare technological genius and a world-renowned entrepreneur and inventor. The breadth, depth, and creativity of his knowledge are truly astonishing. So, what was his educational journey like? How does he educate his children?
Yang Lan once interviewed Musk, discussing education and learning. Musk mentioned that he created a special school for his children (Add Astra), hiring teachers to educate them according to his principles. One important example he mentioned is that when you want to teach a child how an engine works, the best way is to let them take apart the engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STt0dpgn900
We all might have experienced this: when you get something you like, you can’t help but want to take it apart and see how it works. Children are even more curious. Due to a lack of fine motor skills training, many children exhibit destructive behavior. More children abandon this thought under the timely intervention of their parents, and after being stopped or scolded multiple times, they may no longer think about taking things apart, becoming the “well-behaved kids”.
However, a child’s desire to take things apart is driven by curiosity, which is the greatest motivation for learning. Every parent should find ways to protect, guide, and satisfy their child’s curiosity as much as possible, rather than suppressing it too much.
Curiosity is a wonderful thing; when you satisfy it, it doesn’t stay in place but grows even faster.
When a child sees a computer, they will be curious about how it works. When they take apart the computer and see the circuits, chips, hard drives, etc., they will become further curious about how these things work, how they are made, and what else they can do. As the child’s self-control and cognitive abilities improve, this endless and broad curiosity will transform into a desire for knowledge in one or several directions, driving their lifelong learning.
This is the result of the first programming lesson for my daughter. I even took apart a broken hard drive to show her and her classmates the internal structure of the hard drive and explain how cartoons are stored inside.
Since the children are very young, they need some help from adults for disassembly and assembly. However, each child is trying their best to do it themselves. Even when it comes to screwing screws, each child insists on doing it themselves and doesn’t want me to help. So each child completely disassembled and reassembled it. After this lesson, I believe they will no longer just want to take apart computers; their focus has shifted to “how do so many complex and delicate components work together?”
More importantly, allowing children to take things apart can help dispel the notion that “computers are mysterious” in some children’s minds. We should make it clear to children that technology can create many amazing things, but it is not mysterious; we can master it through effort. Science is not religion; it doesn’t need mysticism to enhance it.
Unfortunately, most programming training schools today do not give children the opportunity to disassemble computers. Some may think it’s unnecessary, while most are likely worried that children will damage the computers. Parents share the same concerns. Computers are valuable items, and many adults struggle to guarantee that they can restore them after disassembly. However, computers are quickly phased out; many companies have discarded laptops that are not damaged but simply do not meet work performance needs. These old laptops are actually very suitable for children to learn on.
If you cannot obtain such discarded computers from a company, there are many second-hand laptops available for sale online, some for as little as three to five hundred yuan.
Such computers can also install the Linux system. For older children, having a dedicated computer to experiment with Linux is very necessary, as Linux itself does not have high performance requirements. Even if you are not doing Linux system experiments temporarily, using single-board computers like Raspberry Pi for experiments, this laptop will also be very helpful. Because Raspberry Pi runs the Linux system, much of the development needed for Raspberry Pi can be done on the laptop first and then uploaded.
In fact, in everyone’s growth process, many initial experiences come from parents. Parental support gives children the greatest motivation. So, find a laptop and enjoy the fun of disassembly together with your child (it’s best if Dad disassembles it first to avoid any difficulties later 
). Let the child do it themselves, answer their questions, and tell them what chips are, what memory is, and what a CPU is. This is the child’s first lesson in learning about computers and a rare parent-child activity.
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