Phun, a 2D physics sandbox, is amazing, and there’s a GNU+Linux version that Just Works, as opposed to the Windows version which seems to require extra files and fiddling. I want to say tipping point, but apparently that’s rubbish.

This is my attempt at building a pump. Unfortunately, Phun doesn’t seem to do hydraulics yet. Download the scene here. It’s an incredibly fun little toy, similar I suppose to LittleBigPlanet, but without the baggage of being an actual game (or needing a PS3). In a perfect world, it would run on the XO laptop, but it’s rather CPU-intensive, especially once you start adding water. The learning potential is sky high though: gravity, friction, motion, rotation, leverage, springs, hinges, the importance of things lining up straight… let an 8 year old play with it for a week and they could become a master builder prodigy.

In fact, do you know why child prodigies occur mostly in the fields of mathematics and music? It’s because those fields are accessible with only the tiniest set of tools. You can do world-class mathematics with pencil and paper, and you can make world-class music with just a keyboard. You don’t get many child prodigies in, say, poetry or politics, because being a poet or a politician is about drawing on a vast body of literature and history and experience that is almost by definition totally inaccessible to a child. Physics and engineering are somewhere in between. You can do excellent physics with pencil and paper, but it is very hard to grasp without observing the real world in action. Lego helps, but you can’t build a working 8-cylinder engine out of Lego bricks, and it’s incredibly expensive for most of the world’s children. Free software, on the other hand, is free, so I hope that sandbox games like Phun will one day lower the barriers to entry for the physical sciences far enough that we’ll start raising child prodigies who can build bridges, skyscrapers, and other wonders we don’t know about yet.