Comment on Don't fix the problem just change the parameters
wischi@programming.dev 4 days agoMy daughter got analog clocks before she could read when she was about threw. IMHO it’s a teaching skill issue. Take a normal wall clock, remove all hands except the hour hand, split the day into segments (brushing teeth, lunch, Kindergarten, etc.) and draw (did that in Gimp) some nice symbols and colors. Done. Explain stuff every time she asks “when” using that wall clock. Let that sink in for a year. Now add the minute hand back in.
Analog clocks are not really “obsolete” if you ask me. Hands on a circle aren’t used enough. We have “clocks” (this time inverted - the circle spins and the hand/indicator is fixed) out of cardboards for a week to learn the days of the week, including “activity” symbols for kindergarten, “weekend”, “music lesson”, etc. a wheel for “day of the month”, and one for month of the year also showing seasons.
The total amount of time that was invested in building those was about three or four hours but the value is huge when you have something to point to when she asks anything about time no matter it’s about when we go to sleep, birthdays, holidays, etc.
MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 4 days ago
birthdays? so you have a clock with 365 (+¼) minutes?
wischi@programming.dev 4 days ago
Analog clocks imitate sun dials and of you have amazing eye sight/precision you would only need the hour handle. If the handle is exactly on 3, it’s 3 o’clock. If the handle is exactly in the middle between 3 and 4 it’s half past 3. If the handle is 4° after 5 it’s 04:08. But because our eye sight doesn’t have super resolution we just add another handle that makes a full circle when the hour handle moves an hour. And same with seconds. Second handle makes a full circle for 1 minute.
Back to birthdays - you can do that on the other direction as well but I wouldn’t call it a clock, it’s a circular calendar. Think about a disk (like a wall clock with only one handle) and seven equal segments. The days of the week, every morning we move the handle to the next day. Another disk with 31 segments (day of the month) and another separate disk with 12 segments. We typically move that one on the first of the month to the next step.
Now of we discuss events I can point to a segment and even though she is a young kid she immediately gets the scale of things because of something happens in a few hours (let’s say she is meeting a friend) I show it to her on the normal analog clock with focus on the hour handle. But if she ask about Christmas I point on the “month” dial and she knows that it takes a very long time for that handle to move.
Typical analog clocks have all the handles on the same disk (for convenience and because it’s compact). Our “child-clock” started originally as an normal analog clock with only the hour handle and is now a normal analog clock with hour and minute handle and three more separate disks for day of the week, day of the month and month of the year.