Aunt Jean, as much as she hates to admit it, is one of those rare nerds with finely honed people skills. An electrical engineer with an MBA, she manages a group of support engineers for a company that makes very specialized circuit design and verification tools. She was telling us that the people she hires need to have strong object oriented programming skills (java or c++), the ability to write code in a scripting language (Python, Perl, or tcl), and know how to design logic circuits. I asked her if she thought that was something Christian could handle. She, with the help of one of her engineers, sent us a bunch of resources to study. They matched pretty closely what we are already doing with our Arduino project.
Christian and I are going to look into formalizing a study program to get him (and me–I want to learn, TOO!) ready to do that kind of work. Aunt Jean said they sometimes hire interns to do that kind of stuff. If we spend a couple years learning about these kinds of circuits, not only will we be able to use them in our water project, but Christian might be able to get a summer job. How cool would that be? The other thing is that Aunt Jean is a hard core runner. Maybe Christian could do some of that if he goes to Oregon for summer, too.
On another note, we got the new Version 3 Rosetta Stone French loaded up on our homeschool computer. I started last night and absolutely loved it. Lorena and Kelly are going to jump into it today. Christian will probably wait until after he finishes taking the CLEP Spanish test, but we are all pretty excited about the idea of getting ready to do a semester of immersion French in Quebec or France in a couple of years.
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