There is mystical talk of the Wow! features the iPhone 6 will have when it appears, but no launch date has yet been speculated. Even so, my 10 year old daughter has begun her marketing campaign to acquire one of the first specimens and replace her “ancient” iPhone 4. As an early adopter myself, it takes a lot of restraint to not spoil my kids when it comes to technology. It’s interesting to watch kids today not only enjoy technology (if not obsess over it), but also anticipate the next breakthrough more and more.
This weekend, I took my 2 young daughters to the World Science Festival at NYU. We attended a seminar called “Cool Jobs” where four scientists, three of whom were women, spoke about their cool science jobs to an auditorium full of kids. I think this is the first “seminar” my kids ever attended, and they were fascinated. They heard from a food scientist, video game designer, roboticist, and biomedical engineer who specializes in nanotechnology.
While scientists have historically (and currently) been branded as nerds, it seems that with the boom of social media there is now an extreme cool factor to the nerdiness. Nanotechnology seemed to me to be the most abstract job in the seminar, but the biomedical engineer Michelle Khine was the most dynamic presenter of them all and the one that made the biggest impression on my daughters. My kids’ first seminar, and a bunch of scientists made it fun!
My younger daughter participated in a robotics demonstration where she hid behind movable walls on-stage while other kids tried to find her remotely using a robot. Technology that would ultimately be used for post-natural disaster search and rescue or a quest for life on Mars was able to be explained to children using the game of hide n seek. As children become more engrossed and interconnected to technology, their ability to imagine the future is blossoming. When my kids graduate from college there will probably be so many new types of careers available that we aren’t even dreaming of yet.
So while we are waiting to see what the iPhone 6 will ultimately do to make our lives better, easier, faster, more interesting, more fun, and more fulfilling, my daughter can continue to dream about the possibilities, butter me up, and just make do. I think she’ll manage, but the anticipation is priceless.
What features are you looking forward to in your next Smartphone?
No comments:
Post a Comment