1718 Teaching Minds The way to do this is to look at processes that children engage in during the course of their daily lives and have them first explain how and why the processes work and then try to improve upon them. They could carefully examine the operations of the school cafeteria, for example. Of course, this has to be done in line with the interests that the children actually have. The idea is building the model, not telling them what models they have to build. Every child has an inter- est—animals, sports, family, cars, dinosaurs, whatever. Children need to learn to model the processes that interest them in order to better understand them and to make them better. Children will learn about the modeling process from working on a car engine, for example, if they are taught to think about what is going on in a deep way rather than just learning a set of facts about how the car runs. This is true in any area of interest, from medicine to government to science. Adults have a difficult time with models at work, as citizens, at home, and so on. They don’t always know how things really work. To get people to be better at understanding the processes that they en- gage in daily life, they need to be able to model them. This ability has to be taught and practiced early.. Of course, kids have been building models of actual objects for a long time. Using a kit to build a model airplane is fun but it doesn’t teach you much about how planes fly. More detailed models of physi- cal objects are very helpful. Building a medieval castle, for example, sounds like fun to me, and there are things to be learned from doing this, of course. It is a good activity for little kids, but modeling involves social processes as well. Kids need to understand how the world works, so it isn’t the castle itself that is so important but perhaps a model of the society around the castle, and the need for the castle, that would matter in this instance. HOW TO TEACH EXPERIMENTATION Everyone expe