Question from mother of 8 year old user.
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Greetings,
My 8 year old loves playing with this app. My question for you. From an 8 year old perspective, is the app accurate enough on the laws of physics that he will actually learn something? I read some of the comments in other threads and obvously some contributors to the forum are highly educated in physics. Can I safely tell my 8 year old that what he is "learning" on the app is true in real life? Or should I tell him to take everything with a grain of salt until he can verify it when he is older via real physics classes? I know this app is not intended to be an educational app and is for entertainment purposes only, however, my eight year old is using vocabulary that he has picked up from the app and since this stuff is beyond me . . .
Thanks!
RLL
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@lrjleyba (View Post)
Well, just let him do whatever he wants. While some physics are absolutely accurate, the vast majority of powder toy physics are inaccurate and are just there for fun. But all of them has some degree of realistic physics in it. For a kid that young TPT should be a great way to boost creativity and learn about basic physics and chemistry. By the time he grows up he'll learn enough to know the stuff in TPT was just the basics, implemented in a fun way. -
Powder Toy is a mix of both real and imaginary reactions. A lot of it works really accurately, but other stuff is just entirely made up. I guess you can still say he is learning :P. Even with the imaginary stuff, people still make saves online to demonstrate real-life things and reactions.
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@lrjleyba (View Post)
Even if the physics or burning isn't completely top notch, there's a few elements of the game pretty close to reality that even if they're not realistic they allow for quite complex developments, such as electronics. It's pretty awesome that your kid is learning complex things at the age of eight, but the game is, after all, a game. You wouldn't expect to see blue boxes whizzing around at a nuclear plant, signifying neutrons, however things like electronical memory or calculation circuits are perfectly possible. -
But, as a small heads up, not all parts of the TPT community are particularly kid-friendly. Most of them are, but some of these do exist.
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Another thing you should note - Powder Toy is a great environment to learn programming - it has an easy-to-learn programming language built-in, and a community that is fairly willing to help solve trickier problems (especially if you don't capitalize all of the word 'Lua').
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@lrjleyba (View Post)
Most of TPT reactions are very unreal, but some things are extremely realistic like newtonean gravity and air simulation, but that's only because if not that, the game would be quite counter-intuitive. The game might be not so educative in chemical or physical aspect, but it sure teaches you a lot of mathematics, electronics, and programming, when creating complex electronic mechanisms. -
As much as the game is filled with unreal reactions, it can still trigger the hunger for knowledge, from questions about how, or what caused said reactions to happen. Of course, this is not the case everytime, but it is still a possiblity.
Edited once by HitlerSucks. Last: 8th Jan 2015 -
Building electronics in this app isn't really true to reality, however it does teach a lot of the logical skills needed for programming and mathematical thinking. The physics and chemistry, however, is not really accurate at all
In short: Can potentially aid development of high-order thinking skills with effort, but if he's just making big blobs of C-4 and blowing them up it's not really learning. Still fun though.
