I have been to school open days recently, doing research because in a couple of years our eldest needs to leave his beloved primary school and move onto secondary. To that end we are trying to work out where would be best for him to go, even if we have to move.

Doing this though gets me thinking about learning and teaching though and how both can be so much fun and interesting. I know I have tweeted semi-facetiously about ‘starting my own school’ but a part of me would like to do that.

An idea that has better legs though is this, ‘Curate a set of TED talks that you can show a hall or class full of 9 and 10 year olds’ TEDxPrimary possibly?

What talks do you think you could show a bunch of kids at that age, what talks are not going to go over their heads but are going to inspire and excite them. Get them talking about ideas, and thinking about the future and how they are going to shape it.

I actually think this would be quite exciting,

What talks would you show though, what topics would you want to convey?

Maybe this one:

Or maybe

(The link to the site on how to make the play doh for the squishy circuits is here. I would expect that if we showed this at a TEDxPrimary that the play doh and electrical bits were to hand for a real hands on experience.

Clifford Stoll is always interesting

and of course Brian Cox on why we need the explorers

I’m sure you could think and find more just in the wonderful TED Talks archive, if you reached out across the web to the likes of pop!tech and even our own geekyoto I am sure you could start to pull together an exciting set of talks that a group of 10 year olds could watch and get excited about.

Maybe they’ll get so excited they will make something.

[If you think of an interesting talk then add a link in the comments.]