Gifted and talented kids have a pretty tough time of it. Even when they do manage find an outlet for the stuff buzzing in their head (here’s my 5-year-old son’s first film, if you haven’t seen it already), what on earth can their perpetually-lagging-behind parents point them at to keep them stimulated? While there are some genuinely cool things out there (such as the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum), these sadly tend to be as rare as hen’s teeth. With gold fillings.

One nice thing I like to take Alex to is the interactive monthly meetings of the Surrey Explorers, our local Kingston branch of the NAGC (the “National Association for Gifted Children”). He enjoyed building robots with Dr Bobor of Mitsubishi (here’s Alex’s jet-powered kangaroo robot design), finding out about Lonesome George, making music with balloons, learning magic tricks, etc. This term, he’s really looking forward to Street Dance in September and (as you probably guessed already, CM readers) Codes and Ciphers in October.

On this general theme, here’s something I found yesterday when playing with the Scirus scientific search engine. This summer (I believe), an Australian gifted and talented support organization called G.A.T.E.WAYS ran a series of four Voynich Manuscript-themed days (costing about £100 per child) called “The Mysterious Case of the Voynich Manuscript“, hosted by microbiologist / researcher Dr Geoff Crawford. Session #1 was a introduction to the VMs, Session #2 summarized historical codes & ciphers, Session #3 looked at forgery and hoaxes, while Session #4 was set up so that participants could actually try to crack the VMs for themselves. Yes, I’d say that pitching the VMs to kids like this is pretty cool – good job, I hope it went well! 🙂

Incidentally, for ages I’ve been meaning to give a (rather more modestly-priced, it has to be said) Voynich lecture, possibly at Treadwell’s. However, over the last couple of years, it seems – somewhat paradoxically – that the more I learn about the VMs, the less there is to say. “Voynich history”? Wishful thinking. “Voynich theories“? Hallucinatory enigmatology. Which is not to say that I’m pessimistic: but, rather, that I’d rather now talk about what the VMs is rather than what it might be, as the latter seems not to have got us anywhere in 500 years. 🙁

All the same, I think that there are two huge lessons to be learnt from Voynich research (for both adults and children!): (a) how easy it is to make mistakes when trying to do something really difficult, however clever you are; and (b) how hard it is to join different types of evidence together to build persuasive arguments. Hmmm… I’m not sure how well a über-rationalist message like that would go down with a typical Treadwell’s audience, though. Oh well! 😮

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