Episode 6: Technology, Autism, & The Outdoor Scientist // Dr. Temple Grandin

"Use technology to complement activities, not take over all activity."

- Dr. Temple Grandin

Healthy Screen Habit Takeaway

For more information on Temple Grandin:

https://www.templegrandin.com/

Temple Grandin's TED Talk:

Resources Referenced:

https://www.nasa.gov/

https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/

https://code.org/

https://scholar.google.com/

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/

Show Transcript

Hillary:

It's rare you get the opportunity to speak with one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Today, I get the privilege of doing just that Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used worldwide. Her research and techniques have been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs used by McDonald's, Whole Foods, and other corporations. Now she has done this all by embracing her autism, channeling her unique gifts as a scientist and animal advocate, and now is encouraging kids to put down devices and get outside. I could not be more honored to welcome to the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast, Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin:

It's really good to be here today.

Hillary:

Thank you. You have just published a truly delightful book. Thank you for sending me a copy of The Outdoor Scientist. Why did you decide to write this book now?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I live in a neighborhood, lots of kids in it. I've lived in this neighborhood for 31 years and you almost never see kids outside. They're just not doing the things outside that I did in the fifties as a child. I mean, well, they would say you don't go outside and play. And my sister and I had a rock collection would break rocks open to see what they look like inside of emphasize, got to wear safety goggles for doing that now. And we had a really great rock collection in the tool shed. We'd collect shells on the beach and make stuff out of 'em on. I can remember like taking a buds apart and figure out how they developed.

Hillary:

And even at a young age, you were a scientist and observing nature.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I was like eight. When I was doing a lot of these things. Then I have another book that came out three years ago, Calling All Minds and that's outdoor stuff, but it's more, it's all more stuff where you make things like kites, parachutes, airplanes, things like that because we've got kids today. When I did a book signing for calling all mines three years ago, a good 20 or 30% of the kids in Colorado had never made a paper airplane. I am not kidding. And I had a student in my class and my class said, my Livestock Handling class. Students have to do a scale drawing of a cattle handling facility. I had a student who had never used a ruler in her life to measure anything.

Hillary:

What are they doing instead? What w in your, in your experience with these, with the, cause your work with college-age kids,

Temple Grandin:

College kids, ruler, and I've been having a scale drawing in my class. I've had, I've taught that class for 31 years in the last five or six years. They're having a harder and harder time with doing a scale drawing andit gets back to where we've got kids. So growing up, they don't do anything, any practical things anymore.

Hillary:

I've heard firefighters say the same thing about kids coming into Academy. The firefighting Academy, who don't know the difference between say a Phillips head and a flat head screwdriver.

Temple Grandin:

Nope. We've got kids coming in kids today that have never used a tool. I think that's just terrible. And when I did the Calling All Minds book, one of the projects was in, there is a project I didn't about the second grade. I can still remember my little kid's hands weren't very strong. And I took both hands to cut a coat hanger because I wanted to make a crossbar to put on my parachute strings that I made, made a parachute with a scarf, we grew up using tools. Every kid in the neighborhood was doing that. And I think the other problem we've got today is kids are terrified of making a mistake. And I think this goes back to not doing any hands-on things because I had these little kites I made that had the tinker and tinker and tinker with to get them to work. And I had, I had to do quite a few pieces of paper before I got them to work. People ask me what would I do if I could improve education? The first thing I would do is putting a lot of these hands-on things back in cooking, sewing woodworking.  And we are getting individuals totally removed from the world of practical things.

Hillary:

Right. I know in Calling All Minds, you talk about the difference between clever engineers and mathematical thinkers, right? And you, I, I love the parallel you draw between clever engineers and common sense and the importance of giving kids experience to make things with their hands bringing it back to Healthy Screen Habits, that's part of the challenge of our digital age is this is what devices are keeping us are. Keeping kids from doing is they're providing experiences, but they're not providing physical hands-on experience.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think we need to be using the screens. Okay. Like kids that had never made a paper airplane, and there's lots of stuff on YouTube about making paper airplanes or making paper snowflakes. I was horrified within the last year when I talked about a kid making a paper snowflake and actually held one up, I'd cut out of a piece of printer paper. And I had a teacher asked me in all seriousness, what do you think is going to happen to the kid's self-esteem if the snowflake fell apart because he cut it out wrong. So will you make another one? And then maybe you look it up on YouTube. Okay. That's going to be using a screen to find out how to do a physical thing.

Hillary:

Right, right. it's, you know, we don't build confidence by just continually boosting people up. You build confidence, you build confidence through overcoming challenge. And whether you're being challenged through editing a paper, or like you said, like building a kite that doesn't fly. And then, you know, working on that building then, then builds competence. So they work hand in hand that whole confidence and competence.

Temple Grandin:

But I've had so many parents say to me, my kid's afraid to make a mistake. My kids everything's gotta be perfect. You know, you've got to do good work, but sometimes do make mistakes. I remember wrecking a sewing project. I was about 12. I got in a hurry and I cut the fabric wrong. And it wrecked. I had to throw it away. There was no way to buy more fabric because it was a remnant.

Hillary:

Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's important that we provide lots of those experiences for our kids to find out that the world's not going to end. Cause you, have to throw away the sewing project.

Temple Grandin:

No, it did not end.

Hillary :

And look at you now! I think this goes to that point of what we say at healthy screen habits is we are not anti-technology. We are tech intentional. So not just using technology to, to the extreme where you are losing yourself for hours, but using it as a tool that it was intended for. And then moving forward with whatever project you're working on.

Temple Grandin:

Well, that's the way I would look at it. I had a problem where my toilet broke and I looked it up. I found a YouTube video that showed me how to fix it.

Hillary:

I know that we call it YouTube university.

So when we come back, we're going to speak more with Temple Grandin regarding what, what being on devices too long have to do with productivity.

Hillary:

I'm back with Temple Grandin who recognized that autism gave her a unique lens on the world. She has spent the better part of her adult life translating animal behaviors and now is exploring and explaining why all kids need to be using their hands, exploring outside, and given license to fail. Temple, you encourage kids to use technology for the knowledge-seeking tool that it was intended to be and then use that to apply that knowledge in the physical world, you also warn against spending too much time online.

Temple Grandin:

Well, when I'm saying I as well, especially with autistic kids, and when  I spent 25 years working out heavy construction on supervisory steel and concrete, cattle stockyards, and other things that I had designed, I worked with welders and machinery designers that own their own businesses that I know were autistic. They were just as autistic as they could be. And these are people that worked in the eighties and early nineties, and they were visual thinkers like me thinking pictures and what little video game playing I've done, I'm going, this was like a drug I've got to stay away from this. And what I've seen with some of these kids now with an autism label is that we'll go out and get a job and do things. That's a good thing, or end up just playing video games all day and doing nothing else. And I've read the scientific literature and there's a tendency for them. They'll get more addicted to it, than quite a few other people. So that has to be limited. And they're not becoming video game designers. If they were getting great jobs in video game design, I would not be criticizing.

Hillary:

Right. So what would you say to parents of neurodiverse, kids who ask,  “why do I have to take my kid off of their device, it seems like it's the only thing that makes them happy?” or it's the only thing that they like to do?”

Temple Grandin:

Well, they haven't discovered other things to do. I think this is part of the problem, and I'm not saying I wouldn't ban video games, but it's an hour a day, or you give them a certain budget of time a week when I was a child. I mean, TV was a new thing. When I was a child, we were limited to one hour a day during the week and two hours on the weekend. Well, I think now with these online things that where kids talk to each other I know that's how some individuals get their best social life. And you say, well, you have a budget for the whole week. If you want to spend it on one marathon on Thursday for some big video game tournament, you can do it. But then the rest of the time you can't play it. But I have seen in the last couple of years, three successful young adults getting off of video games.

Temple Grandin:

And the thing that the video game was replaced with was car mechanics, three different separate cases who found that car mechanics was more interesting than video games. One mom happily told me that her autistic kid now fixes trains for the railroad and they love him, but, you know, the visual thinkers like me tend to, like, we like mechanical things, art, photography, graphic design. That was the thing that successfully got them off of it.

Hillary:

I think that speaks to your impassioned cry towards all parents to get kids outside and experiencing real life.

Temple Grandin:

The reason why I did The Outdoor Scientist is, is an, a lot of the things that are in there. Things I did as a child with rocks, the shells the thing about taking plants apart, you know, different stages of development. I did that. I can remember when I was a child trying to watch Sputnik. We went to the field next door and all we saw was airplanes, but there's, there's a chapter in, on the night sky where you can look at a NASA website to find a space station.

Hillary:

Oh! I loved how you did the constellation map in the flashlight! You're, there's a, there's one of the activities where you poke holes in paper and put it over the end of a flashlight and shine it against a wall. 

Temple Grandin:

That's basically what a planetarium does but in a much more complicated manner,

Hillary:

Right. But you could do it in your own bedroom!

Temple Grandin:

That's right. And, and I wanted to have simple things in both of these books, simple stuff that kids can do, not expensive that they could do an L one thing that that I have in the outdoor signage as a college project kids to do an actual college project, I did for an animal behavior class. And what the assignment was is to spend four hours watching an animal. And I, you know, my teachers is no, you're not doing cattle. You're going to find something else to do. You're not doing dogs. They wanted us to kind of branch out. And, and I went to the zoo and there were antelopes and this great big pen in Phoenix, Arizona. And I watched the antelopes. And after watching for a few hours, I find two males in adjacent pens went and put their locked horns through a chain-link fence. They were going to Duke it out with a chain-link fence between them

And It was just something that only lasted for about 30 seconds. But if I, I had to sit there two hours to see that. The rest of the behavior was pretty boring, walking around, eating things like that. And that's the reason why the professor assigned it for four hours. So they could do an ethogram you know, I've had, I had a reporter say to me, well, what about kids in the city? There's nothing to observe for animals. I go, there's pigeons. You could go pick out a pigeon. That's very distinctive. That probably comes back and you can start tracking what it does. That's an animal ethogram, right.

Hillary:

It's rare you get the opportunity to speak with one of the greatest thinkers of our time. Today, I get the privilege of doing just that Dr. Temple Grandin is a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. Facilities she has designed for handling livestock are used worldwide. Her research and techniques have been instrumental in implementing animal welfare auditing programs used by McDonald's, Whole Foods, and other corporations. Now she has done this all by embracing her autism, channeling her unique gifts as a scientist and animal advocate, and now is encouraging kids to put down devices and get outside. I could not be more honored to welcome to the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast, Temple Grandin.

Temple Grandin:

It's really good to be here today.

Hillary:

Thank you. You have just published a truly delightful book. Thank you for sending me a copy of The Outdoor Scientist. Why did you decide to write this book now?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I live in a neighborhood, lots of kids in it. I've lived in this neighborhood for 31 years and you almost never see kids outside. They're just not doing the things outside that I did in the fifties as a child. I mean, well, they would say you don't go outside and play. And my sister and I had a rock collection would break rocks open to see what they look like inside of emphasize, got to wear safety goggles for doing that now. And we had a really great rock collection in the tool shed. We'd collect shells on the beach and make stuff out of 'em on. I can remember like taking a buds apart and figure out how they developed.

Hillary:

And even at a young age, you were a scientist and observing nature.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I was like eight. When I was doing a lot of these things. Then I have another book that came out three years ago, Calling All Minds and that's outdoor stuff, but it's more, it's all more stuff where you make things like kites, parachutes, airplanes, things like that because we've got kids today. When I did a book signing for calling all mines three years ago, a good 20 or 30% of the kids in Colorado had never made a paper airplane. I am not kidding. And I had a student in my class and my class said, my Livestock Handling class. Students have to do a scale drawing of a cattle handling facility. I had a student who had never used a ruler in her life to measure anything.

Hillary:

What are they doing instead? What w in your, in your experience with these, with the, cause your work with college-age kids,

Temple Grandin:

College kids, ruler, and I've been having a scale drawing in my class. I've had, I've taught that class for 31 years in the last five or six years. They're having a harder and harder time with doing a scale drawing andit gets back to where we've got kids. So growing up, they don't do anything, any practical things anymore.

Hillary:

I've heard firefighters say the same thing about kids coming into Academy. The firefighting Academy, who don't know the difference between say a Phillips head and a flat head screwdriver.

Temple Grandin:

Nope. We've got kids coming in kids today that have never used a tool. I think that's just terrible. And when I did the Calling All Minds book, one of the projects was in, there is a project I didn't about the second grade. I can still remember my little kid's hands weren't very strong. And I took both hands to cut a coat hanger because I wanted to make a crossbar to put on my parachute strings that I made, made a parachute with a scarf, we grew up using tools. Every kid in the neighborhood was doing that. And I think the other problem we've got today is kids are terrified of making a mistake. And I think this goes back to not doing any hands-on things because I had these little kites I made that had the tinker and tinker and tinker with to get them to work. And I had, I had to do quite a few pieces of paper before I got them to work. People ask me what would I do if I could improve education? The first thing I would do is putting a lot of these hands-on things back in cooking, sewing woodworking.  And we are getting individuals totally removed from the world of practical things.

Hillary:

Right. I know in Calling All Minds, you talk about the difference between clever engineers and mathematical thinkers, right? And you, I, I love the parallel you draw between clever engineers and common sense and the importance of giving kids experience to make things with their hands bringing it back to Healthy Screen Habits, that's part of the challenge of our digital age is this is what devices are keeping us are. Keeping kids from doing is they're providing experiences, but they're not providing physical hands-on experience.

Temple Grandin:

Well, I think we need to be using the screens. Okay. Like kids that had never made a paper airplane, and there's lots of stuff on YouTube about making paper airplanes or making paper snowflakes. I was horrified within the last year when I talked about a kid making a paper snowflake and actually held one up, I'd cut out of a piece of printer paper. And I had a teacher asked me in all seriousness, what do you think is going to happen to the kid's self-esteem if the snowflake fell apart because he cut it out wrong. So will you make another one? And then maybe you look it up on YouTube. Okay. That's going to be using a screen to find out how to do a physical thing.

Hillary:

Right, right. it's, you know, we don't build confidence by just continually boosting people up. You build confidence, you build confidence through overcoming challenge. And whether you're being challenged through editing a paper, or like you said, like building a kite that doesn't fly. And then, you know, working on that building then, then builds competence. So they work hand in hand that whole confidence and competence.

Temple Grandin:

But I've had so many parents say to me, my kid's afraid to make a mistake. My kids everything's gotta be perfect. You know, you've got to do good work, but sometimes do make mistakes. I remember wrecking a sewing project. I was about 12. I got in a hurry and I cut the fabric wrong. And it wrecked. I had to throw it away. There was no way to buy more fabric because it was a remnant.

Hillary:

Yeah. Yeah. But I think it's important that we provide lots of those experiences for our kids to find out that the world's not going to end. Cause you, have to throw away the sewing project.

Temple Grandin:

No, it did not end.

Hillary :

And look at you now! I think this goes to that point of what we say at healthy screen habits is we are not anti-technology. We are tech intentional. So not just using technology to, to the extreme where you are losing yourself for hours, but using it as a tool that it was intended for. And then moving forward with whatever project you're working on.

Temple Grandin:

Well, that's the way I would look at it. I had a problem where my toilet broke and I looked it up. I found a YouTube video that showed me how to fix it.

Hillary:

I know that we call it YouTube university.

So when we come back, we're going to speak more with Temple Grandin regarding what, what being on devices too long have to do with productivity.

Hillary:

I'm back with Temple Grandin who recognized that autism gave her a unique lens on the world. She has spent the better part of her adult life translating animal behaviors and now is exploring and explaining why all kids need to be using their hands, exploring outside, and given license to fail. Temple, you encourage kids to use technology for the knowledge-seeking tool that it was intended to be and then use that to apply that knowledge in the physical world, you also warn against spending too much time online.

Temple Grandin:

Well, when I'm saying I as well, especially with autistic kids, and when  I spent 25 years working out heavy construction on supervisory steel and concrete, cattle stockyards, and other things that I had designed, I worked with welders and machinery designers that own their own businesses that I know were autistic. They were just as autistic as they could be. And these are people that worked in the eighties and early nineties, and they were visual thinkers like me thinking pictures and what little video game playing I've done, I'm going, this was like a drug I've got to stay away from this. And what I've seen with some of these kids now with an autism label is that we'll go out and get a job and do things. That's a good thing, or end up just playing video games all day and doing nothing else. And I've read the scientific literature and there's a tendency for them. They'll get more addicted to it, than quite a few other people. So that has to be limited. And they're not becoming video game designers. If they were getting great jobs in video game design, I would not be criticizing.

Hillary:

Right. So what would you say to parents of neurodiverse, kids who ask,  “why do I have to take my kid off of their device, it seems like it's the only thing that makes them happy?” or it's the only thing that they like to do?”

Temple Grandin:

Well, they haven't discovered other things to do. I think this is part of the problem, and I'm not saying I wouldn't ban video games, but it's an hour a day, or you give them a certain budget of time a week when I was a child. I mean, TV was a new thing. When I was a child, we were limited to one hour a day during the week and two hours on the weekend. Well, I think now with these online things that where kids talk to each other I know that's how some individuals get their best social life. And you say, well, you have a budget for the whole week. If you want to spend it on one marathon on Thursday for some big video game tournament, you can do it. But then the rest of the time you can't play it. But I have seen in the last couple of years, three successful young adults getting off of video games.

Temple Grandin:

And the thing that the video game was replaced with was car mechanics, three different separate cases who found that car mechanics was more interesting than video games. One mom happily told me that her autistic kid now fixes trains for the railroad and they love him, but, you know, the visual thinkers like me tend to, like, we like mechanical things, art, photography, graphic design. That was the thing that successfully got them off of it.

Hillary:

I think that speaks to your impassioned cry towards all parents to get kids outside and experiencing real life.

Temple Grandin:

The reason why I did The Outdoor Scientist is, is an, a lot of the things that are in there. Things I did as a child with rocks, the shells the thing about taking plants apart, you know, different stages of development. I did that. I can remember when I was a child trying to watch Sputnik. We went to the field next door and all we saw was airplanes, but there's, there's a chapter in, on the night sky where you can look at a NASA website to find a space station.

Hillary:

Oh! I loved how you did the constellation map in the flashlight! You're, there's a, there's one of the activities where you poke holes in paper and put it over the end of a flashlight and shine it against a wall. 

Temple Grandin:

That's basically what a planetarium does but in a much more complicated manner,

Hillary:

Right. But you could do it in your own bedroom!

Temple Grandin:

That's right. And, and I wanted to have simple things in both of these books, simple stuff that kids can do, not expensive that they could do an L one thing that that I have in the outdoor signage as a college project kids to do an actual college project, I did for an animal behavior class. And what the assignment was is to spend four hours watching an animal. And I, you know, my teachers is no, you're not doing cattle. You're going to find something else to do. You're not doing dogs. They wanted us to kind of branch out. And, and I went to the zoo and there were antelopes and this great big pen in Phoenix, Arizona. And I watched the antelopes. And after watching for a few hours, I find two males in adjacent pens went and put their locked horns through a chain-link fence. They were going to Duke it out with a chain-link fence between them

And It was just something that only lasted for about 30 seconds. But if I, I had to sit there two hours to see that. The rest of the behavior was pretty boring, walking around, eating things like that. And that's the reason why the professor assigned it for four hours. So they could do an ethogram you know, I've had, I had a reporter say to me, well, what about kids in the city? There's nothing to observe for animals. I go, there's pigeons. You could go pick out a pigeon. That's very distinctive. That probably comes back and you can start tracking what it does. That's an animal ethogram, right.

Hillary:

Or even insects.

Yes. Yeah. I love how in the the outdoor scientists, the projects and activities, like you said, that the projects are fabulous. The materials are easy to come by. Most can be found outside, or you already have the materials at home and the projects range from artwork to experiments. And one of the other things that I really love about the book is that you spend a lot of time covering other scientists and a lot of women, scientists, women in history. And I think you did a beautiful job of just covering all of that, as well as giving us a peek into your world, growing up, which was a different time. And so that lends its own interest to it. And then your experiences as a child with autism.

Temple Grandin:

But a lot of the experiences that, you know, things we did in this book, them and other regular kids were doing it too all is playing outside. Okay. One of the things that's making a tent by putting a sheet over a roll. Well, we, we did, we actually, we actually sewed some tents that were more elaborate than that out of multiple ripped-up old bedsheets. But that's, and all the neighborhood kids were involved in this. This is just the kind of stuff that we would do. When it was like go outside and figure out stuff to do, make a tent out of old bedsheets.

Hillary:

Going back to the technology side of things. It's not that you’re against technology. It's just the amount of time that is being spent on a device, on a video game when a kid could be doing something, that's exposing them to other things. Correct.

Temple Grandin:

Well, that's right. And you can use you know, even the thing like the paper snowflake will go, you know, there's YouTube videos about that. There's all kinds of stuff available. In making paper airplanes. But the thing that shocked me was one out of four K or maybe one out of three, it was somewhere in between their elementary school children out in a nice part of city outside of Denver had never made a paper airplane I'm shocked. And they got their chance to make a paper airplane for the first time. It's a big theater, you know chucking them off the balcony. And they discovered it was a lot of fun. And I'm concerned about losing skills. There's a tendency to sort of not give enough credit to craftsmanship skills.

Hillary:

Right - You have shared your interest in flight and space travel starting with trying to view Sputnik from a field as a child. As we are recording today a historical event has taken place earlier this week in space travel with the landing of the Mars rover the Perseverance. Have you been following that?

Temple Grandin:

I was online last night. Okay. Now this is using the screen and the Perseverance is taking really interesting selfies of herself with the robotic arm up on Mars, as she's showing off her beautiful handcrafted cables, cable bundles, somebody built that by hand, I had already looked up the camera company already found the cameras. There's hand-done wiring on those kinds of, a lot of the stuff was built in the shop. You're not talking about something that's mass-produced in a factory. You've got craftspeople who made this and they're not getting enough credit.

Hillary:

And I remember speaking with you earlier, you had told me about working on a meat packaging plant, where all of the machinery had to be brought in from Europe.

Temple Grandin:

Poultry now?  Oh, it was a poultry processing plant. State-Of-The-Art. It's about two years old now. And all of the engineering, I call it the clever engineering equipment.  Clever mechanically, clever devices are from Europe. Now, the other thing is interesting is when the patent office first started, it was all the visual thinkers you had to bring models in. It was all what I'm going to call “clever engineering.” And we're not making this stuff anymore. We don't make the state-of-the-art electronic chip-making machine. Neither technology invented here. It comes from Holland. And I read about this a year ago and the economist magazine and I was just horrified. And I think this goes back to Holland and other Europe, Germany, those countries, they, they, you know, skilled trades are not looked down upon and put a whole lot more and they're making this stuff and it costs astronomical sums of money to bring poultry processing equipment over here. And a hundred shipping containers, astronomical.

Hillary:

Yes. Not to mention the effect that, you know, the carbon footprint on that,

I know you you've explained how, the way you think, you see things in pictures and you do not believe that the algebra that's being pushed. It's, it's almost screening potential, clever engineers out of

Temple Grandin:

That’s right.

There's two kinds of, kinds of thinking that go into designing and engineering. First of all, you have an engineering department, the university, all of an industrial design department. That's more my department, but I'm what’s called an object, visualizer. That's a scientific name, make object, visualize the mathematical kind of person is the visual-spatial person. And unfortunately, there's a lot of studies that mix those two together and that's wrong. But the visual-spatial is the more mathematics. And when I did my book, The Autistic Brain, I provided science for that. And there's now been more studies that show, this is true. And you get somebody that's got a label. They tend to be more extreme, maybe mathematical or more extreme, maybe object visualizing. But my kind of mind absolutely can't do algebra. I can do my old fashion, fifth and sixth-grade arithmetic the way it used to be taught, like find the area of a circle. I know how to do that. I can, you know, find out how much figuring out how much carpet you need to do to carpet a room. I'd measure things, that stuff that I know how to do, but I'm concerned that we're screening out these kids. The other thing is screening them out is they're growing up and not getting a chance to use tools. So not growing up and getting enough chance to do hands-on things.

Hillary:

Now, when you spoke about earlier, you talked about when you were, when you first saw video games and you were looking at video games as that visual-based thinker, you said, Oh, I can't do this because you recognize that. Okay. Okay.

Temple Grandin:

And I thought I'd been on it for 20 minutes. I'd been on it four hours.

Hillary:

Yeah. It's that persuasive design.

Temple Grandin:

I'm on my phone. But I use my computer all the time to look up scientific articles, look things up online, do conferences like this. [inaudible]

Hillary:

You just recognize that the games are something that are not for you.

Temple Grandin:

Yeah. I better stay away from them. Now there's a lot of people that play them perfectly fine and they're not addicted to them. And there are some kids with autism where the only place they have friends is with online games where they talk to each other. So you don't want to take that away, but you've got to limit it somewhat because I'm not seeing good outcomes. The outcome is not top video game design. That's usually, it doesn't seem to go that way. Maybe some exceptions of that. And that's just great. But that probably has parents behind that, that we're directing them more towards, well, you got to design a video game that somebody else wants.

Hillary:

Right. And unless you have kind of parents that are maybe involved in Silicone Valley, or maybe involved in that area and they know how to channel those efforts, that that isn't necessarily

Temple Grandin:

Article in the paper a while, back with Silicon Valley, parents were restricting all the video game playing. Yes. Because they know how addictive it is. And they, a lot of them send their kids to Montessori schools, which would have a lot of hands-on activities.

Hillary:

Exactly. Exactly. They've got a lot of hands-on activities, a lot of immersive experiences, and sensory things that that happen. I think the challenge also with when we get into the digital platforms, particularly with our neurodiverse kids, is it locks them into one way of experiencing and it, we need to be working on expanding. Can you talk a little bit about how your mom encouraged you to stretch? To, to move beyond--

Temple Grandin:

My mother had a really good sense that couldn't, shouldn't just be doing the same thing over and over again, because when I was in about third grade, I'd just draw the same horse head over and over again. And my mother would say, let's draw the stable let's, you know, draw where we rode it to. In other words, make associated link back and let's try some other media, let's do a watercolor of a beach on take that art ability and expand it. So it's not just the same horse head over and over and over again, expand that That's what we need to be doing. Right?

Hillary:

Whatever interests the child is showing you take that and move forward with it.

Temple Grandin:

That's right. I agree. And you, you expanded and encourage lots of different things, but I've seen kids like 16 years old, they've done all of the most complicated Legos and that's fine, but the kid has still never used a tool. That's just ridiculous. And we've got a gigantic shortage of skilled trades. And when I had to have my shower fixed-- this was during COVID-- the cost was just ridiculous! Because I couldn't spend a day and a half messing with that with two other apartments turned off so I had to call the plumber. And I hate to tell you what it costs.

Hillary:

Oh, I believe it.  Okay, we often talk about keeping spaces screen-free where we don't allow devices. What do you think about that?

Temple Grandin :

Well, I really agree with that. And in the fifties, when I was brought up and that was true in our dining room and in the next-door neighbor kids too, that when we all had dinner together, we weren't allowed to bring books, toys, or comics or anything like that to the dinner table. This was the time for the family to be together and talk and talk about their day and take turns talking.

Hillary:

I do think that that is one of the interesting things that COVID during our time of quarantine, that it has brought us is I do see more families engaging in more connected things. I think because people are kind of technologically saturated, if you will, where they've spent their whole day on Zoom or that's. Right. And so I do see more families outside taking walks or going on bike rides.

Temple Grandin:

You've seen that too. Yeah. I have seen that too whole families out with, on bikes on, and then I heard that the online jigsaw puzzle sold out just about instantly.

Hillary :

Oh, yes. We always have a jigsaw puzzle going.

Okay. We're going to take a quick ad break and we come back. We're going to be listening to a Temple Grandin. Give us one healthy screen habit.

Ad break

Hillary:

I'm talking with Temple Grandin, a woman voted by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is on a mission to get kids exploring and outside. So, Temple, on every episode of the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast, I asked for one healthy screen habit that our listeners can put into practice in their own home. Do you have one?

Temple Grandin:

Oh, I definitely do because there's all kinds of great resources on the internet. In my book, The Outdoor Scientist, I refer to the NASA website. I refer to National Geographic on The Citizen Science. These great websites on mathematics-- Wolfram Mathematica (wolf, like the animal, ram, also like the animal), code.org-- teach programming. Fabulous, educational resources. A lot of the stuff is free and, and use these things to complement things that you do outside. Okay. Let's say you're watching birds. Well, you can look them up online. You can go on things like Google Scholar and look up-- that's maybe for older kids-- but on scientific articles about it... all kinds of videos on YouTube that show you how to do things.

Complement it. Use it to complement rather than just totally take over.

Hillary:

Right. I love that. Use it as the tool it was designed for as a complementary type thing to an activity outside. And for any of our listeners who want to go out and buy their own copy of The Outdoor Scientist, I will link it in our show notes. But most importantly, I'd say, take those kids and get outside. Thank you, Temple. It's been a true honor to speak with you today.

Temple Grandin:

It was wonderful to be here and thank you for having me.

Hillary:

Or even insects.

Yes. Yeah. I love how in the the outdoor scientists, the projects and activities, like you said, that the projects are fabulous. The materials are easy to come by. Most can be found outside, or you already have the materials at home and the projects range from artwork to experiments. And one of the other things that I really love about the book is that you spend a lot of time covering other scientists and a lot of women, scientists, women in history. And I think you did a beautiful job of just covering all of that, as well as giving us a peek into your world, growing up, which was a different time. And so that lends its own interest to it. And then your experiences as a child with autism.

Temple Grandin:

But a lot of the experiences that, you know, things we did in this book, them and other regular kids were doing it too all is playing outside. Okay. One of the things that's making a tent by putting a sheet over a roll. Well, we, we did, we actually, we actually sewed some tents that were more elaborate than that out of multiple ripped-up old bedsheets. But that's, and all the neighborhood kids were involved in this. This is just the kind of stuff that we would do. When it was like go outside and figure out stuff to do, make a tent out of old bedsheets.

Hillary:

Going back to the technology side of things. It's not that you’re against technology. It's just the amount of time that is being spent on a device, on a video game when a kid could be doing something, that's exposing them to other things. Correct.

Temple Grandin:

Well, that's right. And you can use you know, even the thing like the paper snowflake will go, you know, there's YouTube videos about that. There's all kinds of stuff available. In making paper airplanes. But the thing that shocked me was one out of four K or maybe one out of three, it was somewhere in between their elementary school children out in a nice part of city outside of Denver had never made a paper airplane I'm shocked. And they got their chance to make a paper airplane for the first time. It's a big theater, you know chucking them off the balcony. And they discovered it was a lot of fun. And I'm concerned about losing skills. There's a tendency to sort of not give enough credit to craftsmanship skills.

Hillary:

Right - You have shared your interest in flight and space travel starting with trying to view Sputnik from a field as a child. As we are recording today a historical event has taken place earlier this week in space travel with the landing of the Mars rover the Perseverance. Have you been following that?

Temple Grandin:

I was online last night. Okay. Now this is using the screen and the Perseverance is taking really interesting selfies of herself with the robotic arm up on Mars, as she's showing off her beautiful handcrafted cables, cable bundles, somebody built that by hand, I had already looked up the camera company already found the cameras. There's hand-done wiring on those kinds of, a lot of the stuff was built in the shop. You're not talking about something that's mass-produced in a factory. You've got craftspeople who made this and they're not getting enough credit.

Hillary:

And I remember speaking with you earlier, you had told me about working on a meat packaging plant, where all of the machinery had to be brought in from Europe.

Temple Grandin:

Poultry now?  Oh, it was a poultry processing plant. State-Of-The-Art. It's about two years old now. And all of the engineering, I call it the clever engineering equipment.  Clever mechanically, clever devices are from Europe. Now, the other thing is interesting is when the patent office first started, it was all the visual thinkers you had to bring models in. It was all what I'm going to call “clever engineering.” And we're not making this stuff anymore. We don't make the state-of-the-art electronic chip-making machine. Neither technology invented here. It comes from Holland. And I read about this a year ago and the economist magazine and I was just horrified. And I think this goes back to Holland and other Europe, Germany, those countries, they, they, you know, skilled trades are not looked down upon and put a whole lot more and they're making this stuff and it costs astronomical sums of money to bring poultry processing equipment over here. And a hundred shipping containers, astronomical.

Hillary:

Yes. Not to mention the effect that, you know, the carbon footprint on that,

I know you you've explained how, the way you think, you see things in pictures and you do not believe that the algebra that's being pushed. It's, it's almost screening potential, clever engineers out of

Temple Grandin:

That’s right.

There's two kinds of, kinds of thinking that go into designing and engineering. First of all, you have an engineering department, the university, all of an industrial design department. That's more my department, but I'm what’s called an object, visualizer. That's a scientific name, make object, visualize the mathematical kind of person is the visual-spatial person. And unfortunately, there's a lot of studies that mix those two together and that's wrong. But the visual-spatial is the more mathematics. And when I did my book, The Autistic Brain, I provided science for that. And there's now been more studies that show, this is true. And you get somebody that's got a label. They tend to be more extreme, maybe mathematical or more extreme, maybe object visualizing. But my kind of mind absolutely can't do algebra. I can do my old fashion, fifth and sixth-grade arithmetic the way it used to be taught, like find the area of a circle. I know how to do that. I can, you know, find out how much figuring out how much carpet you need to do to carpet a room. I'd measure things, that stuff that I know how to do, but I'm concerned that we're screening out these kids. The other thing is screening them out is they're growing up and not getting a chance to use tools. So not growing up and getting enough chance to do hands-on things.

Hillary:

Now, when you spoke about earlier, you talked about when you were, when you first saw video games and you were looking at video games as that visual-based thinker, you said, Oh, I can't do this because you recognize that. Okay. Okay.

Temple Grandin:

And I thought I'd been on it for 20 minutes. I'd been on it four hours.

Hillary:

Yeah. It's that persuasive design.

Temple Grandin:

I'm on my phone. But I use my computer all the time to look up scientific articles, look things up online, do conferences like this. [inaudible]

Hillary:

You just recognize that the games are something that are not for you.

Temple Grandin:

Yeah. I better stay away from them. Now there's a lot of people that play them perfectly fine and they're not addicted to them. And there are some kids with autism where the only place they have friends is with online games where they talk to each other. So you don't want to take that away, but you've got to limit it somewhat because I'm not seeing good outcomes. The outcome is not top video game design. That's usually, it doesn't seem to go that way. Maybe some exceptions of that. And that's just great. But that probably has parents behind that, that we're directing them more towards, well, you got to design a video game that somebody else wants.

Hillary:

Right. And unless you have kind of parents that are maybe involved in Silicone Valley, or maybe involved in that area and they know how to channel those efforts, that that isn't necessarily

Temple Grandin:

Article in the paper a while, back with Silicon Valley, parents were restricting all the video game playing. Yes. Because they know how addictive it is. And they, a lot of them send their kids to Montessori schools, which would have a lot of hands-on activities.

Hillary:

Exactly. Exactly. They've got a lot of hands-on activities, a lot of immersive experiences, and sensory things that that happen. I think the challenge also with when we get into the digital platforms, particularly with our neurodiverse kids, is it locks them into one way of experiencing and it, we need to be working on expanding. Can you talk a little bit about how your mom encouraged you to stretch? To, to move beyond--

Temple Grandin:

My mother had a really good sense that couldn't, shouldn't just be doing the same thing over and over again, because when I was in about third grade, I'd just draw the same horse head over and over again. And my mother would say, let's draw the stable let's, you know, draw where we rode it to. In other words, make associated link back and let's try some other media, let's do a watercolor of a beach on take that art ability and expand it. So it's not just the same horse head over and over and over again, expand that That's what we need to be doing. Right?

Hillary:

Whatever interests the child is showing you take that and move forward with it.

Temple Grandin:

That's right. I agree. And you, you expanded and encourage lots of different things, but I've seen kids like 16 years old, they've done all of the most complicated Legos and that's fine, but the kid has still never used a tool. That's just ridiculous. And we've got a gigantic shortage of skilled trades. And when I had to have my shower fixed-- this was during COVID-- the cost was just ridiculous! Because I couldn't spend a day and a half messing with that with two other apartments turned off so I had to call the plumber. And I hate to tell you what it costs.

Hillary:

Oh, I believe it.  Okay, we often talk about keeping spaces screen-free where we don't allow devices. What do you think about that?

Temple Grandin:

Well, I really agree with that. And in the fifties, when I was brought up and that was true in our dining room and in the next-door neighbor kids too, that when we all had dinner together, we weren't allowed to bring books, toys, or comics or anything like that to the dinner table. This was the time for the family to be together and talk and talk about their day and take turns talking.

Hillary:

I do think that that is one of the interesting things that COVID during our time of quarantine, that it has brought us is I do see more families engaging in more connected things. I think because people are kind of technologically saturated, if you will, where they've spent their whole day on Zoom or that's. Right. And so I do see more families outside taking walks or going on bike rides.

Temple Grandin:

You've seen that too. Yeah. I have seen that too whole families out with, on bikes on, and then I heard that the online jigsaw puzzle sold out just about instantly.

Hillary:

Oh, yes. We always have a jigsaw puzzle going.

Okay. We're going to take a quick ad break and we come back. We're going to be listening to a Temple Grandin. Give us one healthy screen habit.

Ad break

Hillary:

I'm talking with Temple Grandin, a woman voted by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is on a mission to get kids exploring and outside. So, Temple, on every episode of the Healthy Screen Habits Podcast, I asked for one healthy screen habit that our listeners can put into practice in their own home. Do you have one?

Temple Grandin:

Oh, I definitely do because there's all kinds of great resources on the internet. In my book, The Outdoor Scientist, I refer to the NASA website. I refer to National Geographic on The Citizen Science. These great websites on mathematics-- Wolfram Mathematica (wolf, like the animal, ram, also like the animal), code.org-- teach programming. Fabulous, educational resources. A lot of the stuff is free and, and use these things to complement things that you do outside. Okay. Let's say you're watching birds. Well, you can look them up online. You can go on things like Google Scholar and look up-- that's maybe for older kids-- but on scientific articles about it... all kinds of videos on YouTube that show you how to do things.

Complement it. Use it to complement rather than just totally take over.

Hillary:

Right. I love that. Use it as the tool it was designed for as a complementary type thing to an activity outside. And for any of our listeners who want to go out and buy their own copy of The Outdoor Scientist, I will link it in our show notes. But most importantly, I'd say, take those kids and get outside. Thank you, Temple. It's been a true honor to speak with you today.

Temple Grandin:

It was wonderful to be here and thank you for having me.