Pack of Smarties

In case you didn't know, last summer I worked at NASA in a high school internship and I got paid pretty decent wages. This kept me busy from 7:30 to about 5:00 during the work week. I also took an acting class over the summer at the local community college. This summer however I am jobless. I haven't really worked since then. I pretty much considered school and robotics my job.

This week I am supposed to be helping my friend, Rene, teach a class for middle school students about robotics. Rene has been doing most of the facilitating and I have just been his right hand man. The lectures include things such as binary numbers, boolean algebra, logic gates, and basic robotics. I do about 10% of the lecturing and it's pretty much just the boring concepts like safety and analog vs. digital. I learned however that these kids are incredibly intelligent. For example today we lectured on logic gates and half adders and full adders and before 8:00 this morning I had no idea what they were and I barely understood it. These kids within moments of it being taught to them were running circles around me.

I have always kind of considered myself to be a fairly intelligent person, but after teaching this class I learned that I am not as smart as I thought I was. I don't remember what I was doing in middle school, but I know I wasn't spending my first week in summer learning the fundamentals of engineering.