Preschooler skill
If you don’t already know, robots will wipe up 20 million jobs around the world by 2030. The current pandemic is only going to further accelerate the situation.
How can you prepare your preschoolers and give them a head start in what Singapore herald as ‘The Fourth Revolution’?
“I wish I known this earlier.” These were the words of Mdm Georgette Chang as she left the auditorium hurriedly. “I’m running late in picking up my five-year-old from kindergarten. He has a violin class later. It’s another busy day!” says the immaculately dressed trophy mom as she puts her foot on the accelerator pedal of her sleeky Mercedes SLK and sped off.
Georgette is a well-heeled and devotedly ‘kiasu’ mother of two. A former Ivy League technopreneur who manages a successful fintech company with her husband. She runs her household like clockwork with the support of two domestic helpers but she still very much prefers to be hands-on and tasks herself to run daily routines like sending and fetching her five-year-old and twelve-year-old from school to enrichment centres.
So, what exactly did Mummy Georgette learn today?
Turns out she attended a parenting seminar where she found out how the importance of pattern recognition in early education and how to help equip her children with the right skills so that they can succeed in the not-too-distant future which will be powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.
“It all boils down to pattern recognition. And you have to start them young. I missed the boat with my elder one.” she says with a huff.
Why is pattern recognition important?
Children learn to identify, create, copy, and extend patterns through their repeated daily activities. Pattern recognition is the foundation and the basis of learning. From birth, children starts to recognise various objects around it, learning how to react and respond to their environment by identifying patterns.
Integrating five-minute patterning activities into your daily schedule is not only fun for children, but also helps them to be aware of patterns in their daily surroundings.
How can learning pattern recognition benefit your children?
When your children start to understand what makes a pattern, how to mimic and copy patterns, eventually making their own, all these skills will not only enhance their understanding of maths but also empower them in areas like art, music, physical movements. Pattern recognition skills such as being able to order from shortest to longest, smallest to largest, things like sorting and categorizing all helps children to understand rhythm and repetition.
Why is pattern recognition so important for our alpha-generation of digital natives?
The future for our kids is technology. For parents who wish to nurture children towards technology-related fields need to first start their children from young. Pattern is everything around in this digital world. A pattern can either be seen physically or it can be observed mathematically by applying algorithms.
Take the test: How good are you with Pattern Recognition? Can you read this?
I cnduo’t bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg. Unisg the icndeblire pweor of the hmuan mnid, aocdcrnig to rseecrah at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mttaer in waht oderr the lterets in a wrod are, the olny irpoamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whoutit a pboerlm. Tihs is bucseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey ltteer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Aaznmig, huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghhuot slelinpg was ipmorantt! See if yuor fdreins can raed tihs too.
Can you read it effortlessly? Most probably you can. The jumbling of the letters in the individual words pose no barrier to your recognizing the original words in the jumbled text.
According to Quora, keeping the first and the last letter of every word untouched, all the other letters in every word have been scrambled randomly. But your mind ignores this scrambling and effortlessly identifies each of the words and continues to read the whole passage without any significant hitch.
According to experts, this example shows the inherent pattern recognition power of your mind in language understanding and is in the domain of Cognitive Science or Artificial Intelligence.
The significance of Pattern Recognition is ubiquitous, it is everywhere in our daily life- pattern recognition plays an imperative role: reading texts, identifying people, retrieving objects to basic life skills like directional navigation.
Preschooler skill
Let us give you a headstart, click here to download free printables to help your preschoolers learn the fun of pattern recognition.
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