I don’t quite remember when and how science became an interesting topic for me. In fact, I suspect it never arose naturally enough because, as a general unwritten rule, getting good grades in my middle and high school meant that taking science (versus commerce) was the default choice. But, as with most things, a lot of these choices we make, have a way of self-reinforcing itself. And so, over time, I gravitated towards a STEM education and towards engineering as an extension. In college though, basic sciences never reached my corner of interest so a master’s or a PhD. was never in serious consideration. I wanted to get out in the world and in the thick forest of commerce and capitalism faster than anything. So finance, and its erected structures and constructs captivated me. I moved a step away from the real world sciences, to one constructed by man to transact and to thrive.
But science in all its glory, scientific thinking in all its unadorned simplicity, continued to appeal to me, even if from a distance, as a voyeuristic observer. I kept going back to books that talk about the progress of science and history of technology, for tied with this history is the progress of humanity itself and how far we have come.
And now, as I see my kids make sense of the world around them, I wonder what paths they’d take in their own learning journey. I also wonder what landscaped gardens can I offer them that makes them furiously curious about the world around them, thus turning it into a fuel to further their own education.
Meanwhile, Starship’s voyage over the weekend is making waves, turning heads, splitting brainwaves, and adorning the memespace due to the deservedly amazing engineering feat it has managed to deliver in a very short time. There is a momentum that the team at SpaceX, w is generating within and outside the space/satellite business areas.
Starship, Mechazilla, Starlinks, Raptors, Falcon, Dragon, Starshield…
The audacity of the ambition that SpaceX harbors is reflected in the semantics it uses to describe the rocketry. It’s symptomatic of the aggression and the predatory ambitions of being a multi-planetary species. A Plan B, of escaping the inflamed planet (if it comes to that), and voyaging into the vast unknown. Stuff like this is why science fiction can become a realist’s nightmare sometimes.
Over at X, there is a euphoria and an optimism that is justifiably inspiring. This, coupled with the slew of Tesla announcements, makes the week a special one for folks over at Elon-town. Admittedly, everything else, every presentation I am working on, or emails I have to send, seems quaint by comparison.
I could, harnessing the fable of the stonecutter, claim that I had a part to play. But it would be a stretch of course. But then, the theory of lone genius is a discarded one by the academia, so I could downplay one man’s role in all this.
And yet, the feats of individual human accomplishments – like those of the fastest man on earth, or the one with the mountaineer, or the one with the survivalist – all indicate a yearn to believe in the unlimited potential of a single individual. It’s remarkable that one person has done so much, and not just lead, but lead from the front and immersed in the details of it.
This post isn’t supposed to be a fawning one, so I will stop here. But, after reading Walter Isaacson’s rich biography of the eponymous inventor of today, I am unabashedly a fan, despite his politics.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” – Alan Kay.
Socrates said, “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom”. We must constantly aim to surround ourselves with things and experiences that add a flavor of wonder to our lives. I feel like traditional education, the way it’s most commonly imparted, misses this very critical ingredient. And I suppose it wasn’t always this way. My guess is that as the need to deliver education (read: literacy) climbed with the ever-expanding population, the standardization that was required left a lot of the established pedagogy in the dust. The need to rely on laymen educators was partly to blame, but so was the need to homogenize the curriculum. Education became fast-food. While it did deliver speed and convenience, it isn’t healthy as a default and a lot is left for the educators to stitch together.
It would be way too easy to blame the educators though, especially in areas with little to no infrastructure and support needed to get trained or leverage tools and techniques. If I hark back to my school days, I realize there were indeed some who played an outsized role in my education. And these were not STEM teachers but instead were focused on either humanities (literature) or history.
I wonder if it’s really the subject, or it’s the way something is taught that makes a difference. It’s fair to say that without an innate interest in learning, no teacher or tool or technique can be effective enough. Interest can be developed of course, and sure enough, a large percentage of education tools focus on this. Gamification of education is something Mr. Musk talks about a lot. Making education as fun as gaming can make it, in turn, as addictive as gaming.
Gamification, to put it crudely, offers reward-based pathways, a competitive play, a collaborative arena, and a sense of world-building/creative exploration. There is more to it than these elements, but they suffice to make my point.
The vaguest form of gamified learning during school for me has been when I participated in expositions, debates, essay writing, or other such minor competitions that were organized by either the local commercial establishments (SBI) or the Rotaries and Lion clubs of the small district I grew up in. These competitions were more agentic by design, and required a pivot away from the rote learning that I otherwise participated in. But these were localized to the extent those days were localized without the world wide web.
These days, I hear and come across a variety of learning methods that bring a massively open gamified experience, a case study based curriculum, a multi-modal experience using immersive technologies, a community-based Slack-style group learning practices, etc. Digital technology has expanded the realms of the possible for kid’s education today. I cannot wait to see how it unfolds as we push the frontiers. But, the thing that stays constant are the things that inspire us, that give us a sense of wonder, and that elevates our framing and our thinking to something beyond us. Maybe progress can be a the new religion, and an open one at that.
Jargogled Impressions. 
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