There is a running joke in my family about asking dad to help with homework. I love helping my kids with their math and science; unfortunately, I love it a little too much. Every night, during homework hours, I patrol the rooms and ask the haunting question again and again "ANYBODY NEED ANY HELP WITH HOMEWORK." Occasionally, I get a taker.
The running joke in the family is that when you ask me for help, you never know if you will get the long answer or the short answer; and if it is a long answer night, you better get on your pj’s and grab a cup of hot chocolate because we will be in it for the long haul. After hearing their homework question, if I answer with "ah, why don’t you finish everything else first and then we’ll take a look at it", you know it is time to be very afraid. This usually means that I’ll be giving the long answer and want to make sure the rest of your homework is done first. When other family members hear me starting to go into long answer mode, they often run for the hills. Bedroom doors close, pets hide in their crates, and the house becomes silent. Actually, everyone starts cracking up laughing and feeling sorry for the poor child about to get a dad lesson. (Usually the child about to get the dad lesson is laughing too)
A favorite example of a dad lesson that everyone still talks about is the time one of my kids innocently mentioned during homework "gee, I wonder how a calculator works". Before the night was over, we were writing binary math logic and talking about ripple carry on daisy chained half bit adders. It was a particularly fun one that really engaged* the kids and we continue to use it as a barometer to compare to other long version answers.
The kids never know when it will happen, and they think it is completely random. Truth is, I try to only pull this trick very occasionally and only when I know they can afford the time. However, it keeps each night’s "ANYBODY NEED ANY HELP WITH HOMEWORK" yell a little more interesting.
Well tonight was a long answer night for poor unsuspecting Justin. I just couldn’t help myself. It was a physics question and they are learning classic Newtonian mechanics stuff, and I’m sucker for a good Newtonian mechanics problem. He grasped the concept they were covering, but in his work he was getting the Vx and Vy components of his velocity a bit mixed up. It was one of those "A ball is hit at an angle of 60 degrees from the horizon with a velocity of 20 meters/second. How long will the ball travel before it hits the ground? How far will the ball travel? What will its maximum height be?"
The root of his problem was a simple one; he didn’t draw the picture. So, we drew the picture, and talked through why it is so important to always draw the picture before you start plugging in formulas. He agreed, and realized his mistake as soon as he saw the picture drawn in front of him. Justin must have been feeling adventurous tonight because he then asked "can you make up another problem similar to this one, and I’ll see if I get that right" You bet I can! So, I wrote up a question about two battleships a certain distance apart in the ocean. I gave the angle of inclination of a cannon on one battleship and suggested an initial velocity of the cannon ball as it was fired. I then asked, "Will the second ship get hit" I could see by the look in his eyes that he actually found the way I worded the question a bit fun and intriguing. His homework problem just said find the Range, Max Altitude, and Final Time; which sounds too boring. Will ship A blow ship B out of the water or not, is a bit more fun. Sure we had to make some assumptions like pretend the cannon is a sea level, pretend the battleship B has a real tall mast, so as long as you prove the cannon ball doesn’t fall short, you can assume a hit.
As he worked out the problem, I could see that he was actually having fun with it. I knew then that I had him hooked for the long haul tonight. He finished, and asked "did I get it right?" My answer was "I have no idea. We haven’t written the computer program yet called Cannon Attack and so we have no way to plug in the values and check them" Ah, I had him good. You see, while he was working out the problem I was strategizing. I knew that VB Express was available for us to download on one of the home computers and thought we could have a little fun. He finished up the rest of his work while I got VB Express installed. Then the fun really began.
For tonight, we just got the basics in place. We created functions for each of his formulas. I made a few typo errors when he was pulling the formulas out of his memory to see if he was paying attention, and he caught every mistake I made. I really knew that I had him good if he was paying close enough attention to catch my errors. I was also impressed that he pulled the formulas from his head instead of looking them up. We then added some text boxes to a Form to allow for each of the battleships logistics to be entered; latitude, longitude, cannon angle and cannon ball velocity, and then added a "Fire" button. We added a Hit or Miss label and also a status panel that contained the homework metrics Range, Max Altitude, and Total time. We wired everything up, pressed the fire button, and noticed a negative elapsed time. This was wrong, but very cool because now he got to see some debugging in action. We stepped through the code and noticed that our value for Sin(x) didn’t correspond to what he had gotten when he did the problem on paper. Justin blew me away at this point; he suggested that perhaps it had to do with degrees versus radians. Bam, he was right on. We converted our degree to a radian double and all was good. We fired up the app, he plugged in some coordinates and had some fun; miss, miss, miss, HIT!
Who knows, maybe before the school year ends we can rework Cannon Attack and introduce some Direct X and get some real battleship graphics going on too! Overall it was another fun night of homework. A few times during the fun my wife walked by us saying "poor Justin, you had to go and ask dad a physics question." Man, I really do love math and science homework questions. The kids might kick and scream a bit when I offer my help, but I know they are really having some fun :-)
Engaged* = bored them to death, but leaves them in stitches laughing when ever talked about it