Looking to help your kids to think like a geek? Consider learning to play an instrument together.
As a Suzuki “home teacher“, it’s my role to model how to learn and practice each piece of music. Just like working through a reverse engineering problem, my son and I first break each piece down into its individual phrases. We then experiment with different strategies for learning each phrase, often further breaking a phrase down into smaller parts. We finally "solve" a piece by slowing putting its parts and phrases back together.
While learning to play a piece of music is not exactly the same as decoding the human genome, I believe the process and Suzuki techniques (let alone the perseverance) we practice transfer to solving many types of problems outside of music. What better way to teach kids how to think then to spend 20 minutes each day solving a musical “problem” together?
