I recently spent a week at a friend’s house, and they have three small children. Living with young children is a stark contrast to living with teenagers. While my own children (both teenagers) impress me with their observations, their leaps of logic often make sense to me. Young children on the other hand make many leaps of logic that seem random or chaotic as they test their own models of how the world works.

During my visit, one of the young boys showed me Scribblenauts, a puzzle game on the Nintendo DS that presents you with a series of challenges (220 in total I believe). You are able to use any objects that you can think of to solve the challenge. You summon objects by typing the word for those objects, such as a ladder or a shovel. I might have been able to specify an object or two that the game was not able to create, but I am impressed by the vocabulary that the game supports – even singularities and Cthulhu.

Playing the game with the young boy was enlightening because he usually employed a different approach to solving each problem than I would. The game engine can support multiple solutions because it is a physics simulator, and the objects in the world interact with each other in a physical fashion. As an example, one of the problems in the world was to get a cat off the roof of a house. One way to accomplish that is to put cat food on the ground and the cat comes down to eat it. Another approach could be to place a dog on the roof and have it chase the cat off the roof. Yet another approach could involve catching the cat with a net, or even dropping rocks (most any object as a matter of fact) on the cat to knock it off the roof.

While playing the game with the young boy, I began to see how he approached problems and changed his tactics as his older approaches no longer solved the problem set before us. Seeing and being able to recognize his different way of seeing the world expanded my own repertoire of approaches and led me to this week’s question.

Has a child ever inspired a solution for you when trying to grapple with a problem? I suggest substituting anything for the term child, such as a pet, a spouse, a cat reaching through some bars to catch a mouse, or even an apple falling from a tree.

I suspect we find answers to problems all the time in the mundane observations of the world. I wonder if by sharing what led up to those inspirations we can accelerate or spot ways to make tools that can help us explore and inspire new approaches to ever increasingly complex problems.

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[Editor's Note: this was originally posted on the Embedded Master]

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