Parenting: The 4th-Grade Science Fair, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

We're fortunate to have three amazing children that have grown into amazing, successful adults. Before I lose recollection, I figure on sharing some of the stories of raising them.

Our youngest was in 4th-grade and came home one day to explain how her class... her 4th-grade class... was having a science fair, and she wanted to make a calculator. As tech-savvy as a young-for-her-grade child can be, I was not prepared for this.

Truth be told, I sort-of dreaded this day. I'd seen enough science fairs/class projects with the older two kids where parents were too involved. Not just involved, but far too involved. Parents so concerned with letting their kid fail, they focused on making them win. These class projects had become an arms race, few parents willing to take a chance on their child losing... err, not getting the highest grade in the class.

So there I was, faced with what should have been an easy choice. I needed to tell my earnest, enthusiastic, daughter, so serious, so passionate in her request, that she needed to pick some other project. Like, growing plants under different color cellophane, or growing meal worms, or anything age appropriate for a young 8-yo (she might still have been 7). I did not want to be one of those parents that did the projects for their kids.

However, I remembered those parents... are in an arms race. I wasn't worried about my daughter getting a A- ... I realized she was cannon fodder if I didn't help. In a snap decision, with a barely-concealed heavy sigh, I said "Sure, we can do a calculator. You'll have to learn what all the components are, explain what their functions are".

In that moment, I entered the conventional arms race with a nuclear warhead.

So, I built a breadboard-style calculator with exposed components, my daughter labeled the components, I wrote the code for the Atmel ATmega MCU, and it worked OK as a four-function calculator. Once you commit, there's little guilt. I'd launched the ICBM.

Daughter got an A. Her calculator was the star of the fair. The other parents saw me for the rogue nation I'd become. A couple of years later, that daughter revamped the calculator into something else entirely, and won that class invention fair as well. The other parents didn't look so surprised, but I still felt badly for the kids from neutral nations.

She went on to Electrical Engineering undergrad, accepting an offer from Texas Instruments (total irony?), where she now leads a team that manages external vendors. Today we say I was her first outside vendor on the calculator project.