Veemonroe
2d ago
Just to be clear, here, autistic doesn't equal poor social skills.
There are a lot of actually autistic people (stereotypically women) who never get diagnosed because they're people-pleasing social chameleons, at great cost to their mental health. Mini STEMlord's little bro is also diagnosed autistic and has a thousand-watt smile plus the personality to sell ice to Inuits.
Mini STEMlord just needs the right peer group. The danger - autistic or not - is where someone gets to adulthood always having been 'the gifted kid' and 'the smartest guy in the room' but they're not in the wider scheme of things, and they can't cope when they realise. I suspect it's easier to fix that in home ed, than it is in a classroom (unless it's an uber-selective school).
Veemonroe
2d ago
Thanks :) We were already looking at Beast Academy, but I've added Math Pickle!
Veemonroe
2d ago
Mini STEMlord's mum here. He's got severe SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder), which gets dramatically worse when he's even slightly ill, and this causes violent fight/flight meltdowns in response to light/noise. The local state school/council paid for a support worker to remove him from class if he looked like he might melt down.
If he's in a forest or some similar low-overwhelm environment, his only problem is a tendency to monologue. By the time he left school, he was being 'corridor educated' by the support worker, doing work far below his abilities, and had started developing a bad case of 'smartest guy in the room' syndrome. He told me, with puckish malice, that he'd "rated [his support worker's] intelligence as a fraction, 16/256".
He's just started a day-a-week forest school where most of the kids seem to be academically gifted and autistic, and he had a fascinating too-and-fro with another kid who gave him as good as he sent. So, hopefully, that will be good for him!!! :)
Veemonroe
2d ago
I'm the mini-STEMlord's (love that, @MadMonzer) mum.
His nanna has treated us to a Bambu Lab 3D printer. He says he's always wanted a 3D printer since he knew what one was, and enjoys sitting in front of it, watching it print. He likes Snap Circuits, but he can do all the projects instantly (and free-build), so I'm going to learn Arduino with him - I'd previously bought an Arduino kit to use myself.
He's bought glueable model kits while on trips, but they've never really taken off with him.
Mini STEMlord's mum here. I'll look into Lego SPIKE, but it's super-expensive and he's already bankrupting me by building 2,000-piece Lego sets in a matter of hours! I've got an Arduino starter kit, which I originally bought for myself but didn't use, so I'm going to work with him on that.
My mum's just bought him/us a Bambu Lab P1S. We're not at the point of doing CAD work yet. We're still working on 'how to choose and print your own project from your laptop (without your mum's help)'. Thanks for the recommendation of ONSHAPE, though. I figured a CAD package would be expensive, but ONSHAPE looks like it's free for home/educational users.
Mini STEMlord gravitates towards sci-fi horror (terrifyingly, as he's only eight) and loves complex board games, so I've been trying to get him interested in Warhammer 40k, mostly as an excuse to build the Adeptus Mechanicus army of my dreams... But, he's not really gone for the (family-friendly) snippets I've shown him so far yet. Maybe as he gets older...
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