Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Active Threads This Week

It is awesome that your son taught himself English by playing Minecraft.

My son, now 20, has also always been a self directed learner, who dives deeply if something catches his interest. He was similarly motivated by Minecraft to improve his reading. His father played Minecraft and a range of other games with him and they discussed game theory and optimisation strategies (genetic inheritance is a strong determinant of intelligence, so most gifted gifts have gifted parents). By the time DS was in his teens, he had lost interest in games and was much more focused on academics, music and sports, but from his early interests, I would suggest that some useful activities for 8-12 yr olds include Rubiks puzzles (my son participated in all of the different Rubik’s events, including 2x2x2 to 6x6x6, pyraminx, single handed solves, blindfold solves and the Ubik), chess and robotic programming.

I cultivated an early love of maths by introducing the concept of other counting systems - Roman numerals, binary, other number bases. My son found and really enjoyed watching ‘Numberphile’ YouTube videos which I highly recommend. They introduce concepts such as irrational numbers, infinite sets, etc, in interesting and challenging ways that stimulated my son to learn more about these concepts himself. By the time he reached high school, he had informally covered most of the school math syllabus up to 10th grade and was accelerated by the maths HoD, so he formally finished 10th grade in the middle of 7th grade. He is now an engineering student, in his third year of an elite honours course, and is proficient across software & FPGA programming as well as circuit design. Since he learnt everything creatively and was not tied to formal conventions, but works as an editor of commercial maths & physics resources, he is both innovative and rigorously thorough. He recently received feedback from his course convenor that his designs are the best they have ever seen, so I would advise supporting self directed exploration with occasional guidance towards activities and resources which provide interesting challenges and stimuli.

Online learning means using the internet to attend classes, watch lessons, and do homework. It happens through platforms like Zoom, Google Classroom, or other apps. Many schools used it during covid so students could keep learning safely at home. You might lọok at Italian Brainrot Clicker for entertaining during online classes.