Yes, I was at this year's TED Youth conference in New Orleans. It was a lot of fun. Here are some of my random thoughts on the whole thing.
Some Impressive Talks
I can't remember exactly what I was doing when I was only 13, but I certainly wasn't giving a talk at something like TED Youth. Check out Maya Penn, a 13 year old that launched her own business (and more). Or what about McKenna Pope? She is another 13 year old that convinced Hasbro to change the way they sell the Easy Bake Oven. Oh wait. There was ANOTHER 13 year old. Sicily Kolbeck built a tiny little house. These were all great talks.
There were other "young" people that presented some impressive ideas. There were teenagers and undergraduates. You can find the full recap here and here.
A Few Details
I love the science behind animated movies. Really, there is a ton of great stuff to explore. Tony DeRose has probably the coolest job title: Senior Scientist at Pixar (well, maybe Space Cowboy could be a better job).
His talk was very useful for high school classes. It's not so easy saying something complicated in just 6 minutes, but Tony showed how you can think of addition, multiplication and trigonometry in terms of things that happen in an animation. Of course there are cooler things than this. The whole idea of how to you make a mathematical representation of some complicated object is just really interesting. I will have to write a separate blog post about this.
I really enjoyed Joy Reidenberg's discussion of whales too.
What Did I Talk About?
If you could share just one idea with many students, what would that one idea be? For me, I wanted to show how powerful the idea of a model could be. You don't have to have an exact model for it to be both useful and fun. Now, here is where I perhaps made my mistake. I decided to focus on the model I built to calculate the power needed for a helicopter to hover. Yes, I probably have already written about this hover model too often - for example, here is a calculation for the new S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier.
The thing I love about this model is that it is based on some fairly simple ideas but it still agrees with actual helicopter data. I just think that is cool. However, it might be a little too complicated to fully explain in under 6 minutes. It might have been better to just focus on a whole bunch of different models. Overall, the talk was still fun (at least I had fun).
Other Possible TED Youth Talks
While I am thinking about TED talks, I have some other possible ideas that I could have presented. Maybe I will put together these as a quick video-based talk, just in case I need them for later. Here they are in no particular order.
Just what is a grade? It seems all too easy for students to get caught up in the grade race. This happens when they put good grades as the highest goal. Sure, there's nothing wrong with getting an A in a class. However, just because you get a B or even a C doesn't mean you haven't learned anything. Learning should be the goal in school, not grades. Grades are just a tool used to measure progress - a tool that just gives a rough estimate of true learning. Maybe this post gives a nice idea of my views on grades.
What is a numerical? I actually used some numerical models in my TED Youth talk. My focus wasn't so much on what and how you use them though. It could be quite useful to show how a computer can break down a complicated problem into very many simpler problems. Maybe my favorite example of a numerical calculation is model a mass oscillating on a spring. Just using very simple forces, you get a trajectory that looks just like a cosine function - but with no circles. Oh, I could have shown how you can determine π without a circle too.
Real vs. Fake Videos. This is one of my strong topics (see examples). As a bonus, everyone loves looking at videos and debating whether they are real or fake. It must just be in our human nature. I think I could pick maybe 3 videos to look at in 6 minutes that would be both entertaining and inspiring.
What is the REAL game of Angry Birds? Everyone knows I love Angry Birds. You might think the goal of the game is to knock over pigs. In that case, you would be wrong. The real game is to create experiments to figure out how the game works. Angry Birds is perfect in this sense and a lot like real science. You can't just do whatever experiment you like. Instead, you are limited by the levels and situations you see. This is just like real science also.
For me, Angry Birds isn't real science. However, you do many of the same things you would do in science. In a sense, Angry Birds is like a modular rock climbing wall. It's a lot like real rock climbing but you don't get to the top of a mountain. It's still fun though.
Bigger things are not the same as smaller things. I used to build airplane models when I was younger. To me, it seemed like you could make a smaller version of something and it would be just like the bigger thing - except smaller. In real life, this isn't true. Consider these giant jaegers from the movie Pacific Rim. You can't make them both the same proportions as a human and tall but move like a human. That just doesn't work. The problem comes about when you have something that depends on surface area and something that depends on volume. If you make something twice as tall (with the same proportions), the surface area is 4 times as much but the volume increases by a factor of 8.
Problems with scale don't just show up in movies (but those are great examples). Scale explains why bigger hail falls faster and why smaller planets cool off faster than larger ones. This stuff is real.
The ancient Greeks did some awesome things in astronomy. We take a lot of stuff for granted now. Everyone agrees that the Earth is a sphere, but how do we know? How far is the moon from the Earth? What about the Sun? Well, it turns out that the Greek philosophers figured much of this stuff out way before Google was available.
I love this story of the Greeks. It shows that you don't need fancy equipment to figure out some of these things.
That's it. Maybe I will get around to making some of these as short presentations - just in case.
Oh, let me leave you with a TED Youth inspired haiku:
I need to get an external battery for my phone.
