That turned dark quickly. Instead
of being the great thing, it turned out to be a big, embarrassing
miscalculation of what it was going to be.
And this was a complete mess. This was a total disaster
I'm not sure who I felt sorry for more. The investors or the kids
that were going to learn with this book.
When it came out, I think it did OK
but the kids were disappointed.
And I thought there might be some interest in that.
[laughter]
This is our friend Doug. He actually got involved
a couple years later.
And that's what he got involved with.
So the book you guys probably are aware of
but in case you are not, Doug's book is called Make Just About Anything: Electronics Without a Workbench.
It is a really fun book.
I mean I have several in the garage that have been around
and I am finding a lot of them that are missing.
Anyway, he and some of the other writers that I know
who are writing at that level are thinking of doing a
version of that for kids in the US.
Maybe we can help on that one.
This is a more recent thing that we've done.
This is another book, the latest thing.
And that's what they are doing now.
It's actually something they do as an elective in schools.
You can take this as a senior or something
and make the basic circuits that you need for the course
as an elective or you can go to a few other places to study it
or take a few other electives.
These are the kids who probably are not making a whole lot of money
from their invention so they have to come up with another way of making money
They've done one thing with the book.
I think it's about the fourth one they did.
This is actually, I had one of the original
people that did this and we talked a lot about it.
He had a number of ideas but he had the idea
that his stuff was used for video games.
They went to the industry and showed them and talked about the problem
that they had, and got back the result,
where the kids from school do this.
And they basically started making a bunch of money on it
and they had a series of books, I think, three or four of them.
This was one of the big success stories.
These were really high level people.
We went to the office a couple times to look at these kids.
They had stuff that they had just done recently, that actually was selling.
And I mean high tech stuff and I have a bunch of slides on this.
Anyway, the point here was, that is one way.
I've talked about some of these kids
who went to community colleges, to high schools,
and got some nice things from that and went on to study something else.
One thing that really is a big motivator, especially for parents,
I think for parents and a lot of parents don't realize this,
is that as a kid or as a teenager or a young adult,
at the end of the day, you want to be taken seriously
and to be taken seriously in school
means being able to do what the kids who are ahead of you
can do.
And you can do it the same way, or a better way, if you understand it.
And you can do it the same way if you learn something.
If you're just learning by hearing the teacher explain things to you
then you're at a disadvantage and the kids can tell.
In terms of doing it yourself, this is one of the reasons I think that
one of the other reasons that a lot of these kids
we talked to in the earlier days
were interested in invention, and interested in working with us
was this thing about being taken seriously.
They had gone to high school and they had done all right
but they had to take things in a certain way.
They had to do what the teacher asked them to do.
And they had to do what was possible.
You had to be very precise.
And in fact, one of the ways I described
the whole approach that we had in our schools
was we were always doing the thing that was called
"It's about time".
Because a lot of times the kids have spent a lot of time
on something and they know that's not what
we are supposed to be doing here.
And that we are doing this to see whether or not they can do it
and we are not supposed to be spending all that much time
going backwards.
It's a different kind of job.
And even though you can do it the way we are doing it,
I can do it in less time.
I don't know how but there is ways
that are easier for me than it is for you.
I can do it in less time.
So that is one of the things that these youngsters are learning.
A lot of the stuff is just basic things about school, and if you know
that in order to be respected by society,
one of the most important things in our society
is to be able to reason correctly.
There is a big difference between being able to reason correctly
and just learning by going through a checklist
of what you have to do to pass the test.
One of the reasons we were in the city was
that it's important for the kids to have mentors.
We weren't there to take over as mentors.
It was a way of giving the kids ideas about it.
They weren't going to learn by looking at how we did it.
They were going to learn by seeing how we did it
and learning that there were things they can do.
Now what that leads to is a certain amount of respect
that they are doing it in a different way.
In fact, some of them didn't really understand that we were there
to be able to learn from them and help them
they thought we were there to learn from them.
And they didn't know how to make that distinction.
And the kids have to know that that's the reason.
We weren't there to take over and run the place.
But you need to be able to get that sense,
not just that they're interested in you,
but that they're interested in you.
There is something about your ideas.
That might be a better phrase.
It's not even the idea.
It's the fact that you are having an idea.
And they don't know how to respond to it.
One of the things I noticed in all the different groups of students
we talked to, is that once we found them to be able to do it,
that was the best thing that could happen to them.
One of the big reasons why some of these kids
wanted to go and help other kids, was to be able to
get them to understand why they were so interested
in what they were doing.
For one of the other reasons,
in one case it was a kid who had gone through a lot of trouble
to put a camera up on the thing.
He was very enthusiastic about all the problems with the way it worked.
I thought that was interesting.
He was the kind of kid who spent time on everything he did.
So anyway, he was in a lot of trouble.
He was a good kid, but he had been doing this for a long time.
And he was going through all this trouble just to make it so
the other kids couldn't stop him from messing with things.
And so when he got an idea about a new way of doing it,
he was very interested in that idea.
So that was pretty much typical, and
that's another reason why the students were very interested in it.
If you give a kid an idea and he tells you it's not a good idea,
that's a great opportunity to say, "Look, you don't know.
You're new to this. I do this and I am so much more experienced.
What are you going to do? You have a lot of ideas."
That's an important thing.
If you have a kid who has got the enthusiasm
and the capability, you're not going to mess with that.
And the kids didn't want to mess with that.
We really talked to the kids
in order to make the distinction between
the stuff you should mess with and the stuff you shouldn't.
If you're worried about teaching the teacher and teaching the kids,
if you've never spent a lot of time around schools,
you don't know what's really important.
They do.
So a lot of what the kids can do in their life is just about being human.
For some of the
