A young mind learning Nitrox

[aviator8]

So I am doing NAUI Nitrox certification with my daughter, who got Jr OW certified this year. This is really cool and very entertaining because she has a lot of questions that are non-stop. I am going through the course with her so she doesn't get stumped on what some words mean.

A small section that should take 5 mins to read ends up being a 30 min discussion because she asks multiple questions per sentence! It is simultaneously, fun, entertaining, and frustrating all at the same time. I'm loving doing training with her. She is so inquisitive I can't seem to feed her too much information.

I'm having such a good time with this I thought I'd share a few of the questions an 11 year old wonders while discovering Nitrox, gas laws, and partial pressures. We are hardly a tenth of the way into the materials. Here are the highlights from last night:

• Shouldn't we take the argon out of the gas?
• How do you remove a gas from a mix?
• If you keep putting air into a tank wont it eventually become a solid because the molecules pack so tight in the tank?
• Wait, oxygen can be poisonous? This all sound much more dangerous than I thought.
• Oxygen can make things explode? Like can my lungs catch on fire? Me - under the right conditions a human can catch fire. Can everything catch fire? Me - if it is combustible yes. Her - how about bedrock can 100% oxygen make bedrock burn?
• Helium? That's the thing that makes your voice squeak. Why does your voice get higher?
• Neon? since it is a lighter gas like helium will your voice be high pitched if you breath it?
• Helium, Argon, Krypton, Neon, Xenon, Radon? This all sounds like outer outer space. Who names these? How do they find these? Why do they all have science fiction names like outer space?
• So the gas laws are named after the people who discovered them? Yes. Who would name their kid Boyle?

 

[KenGordon]

So the gas laws are named after the people who discovered them? Yes. Who would name their kid Boyle?

Frankie Boyle - Wikipedia

Unfortunately not really suitable for 11 year olds, but extremely funny.

 

[tbone1004]

@aviator8 that's a lot more questions than I've ever had while teaching that subject...

 

[flyboy08]

Imagine being her CFI? Yikes ....

 

[tbone1004]

Imagine being her CFI? Yikes ....

they'll have to bring their a game! She'll also weed out the ones that know what they're doing from the ones that don't.
Looking at those questions, there are exceedingly few instructors out there who know the answers to those questions off the top of their head, and even fewer who can give full explanations. Only one I would have missed is the history of the names of the gases themselves. I know argon essentially comes from the greek word for "lazy" because it doesn't react with anything, and radon had something to do with radiation, but after that I'm out.

 

[Graeme Fraser]

Frankie Boyle - Wikipedia

Unfortunately not really suitable for 11 year olds, but extremely funny.

DEFINITELY not suitable for young ears! Made the fatal mistake of taking my 16 year old daughter and her friend to see a little known Frankie Boyle at The Hexagon in Reading. I spent the whole show wishing the ground would swallow me up. They, of course, loved it!

 

[RyanT]

@aviator8, wow, what a fun journey!

I've heard it said that, "All children are born scientists; they ask great questions. Then teachers and mentors beat the inquisitiveness out of them so that they can grow up to be regular people. It's the few kids who refuse to stop asking questions that become scientists." I sure hope she never stops asking questions. Your post sure made my day!

 

[tridacna]

Frankie Boyle should teach Nitrox. Wait, make that Nitrous. Would be a great class.

 

[aviator8]

Frankie Boyle - Wikipedia

Unfortunately not really suitable for 11 year olds, but extremely funny.

Definitely not kid material. I'm gonna have to make sure she doesn't google that one, though she would likely hear that and turn it off an tell me "that was inappropriate" Funny stuff though.

that's a lot more questions than I've ever had while teaching that subject..

Yes that's the frustrating part. Its hard to get through the material for all the questions. I love it but some of it is not relevant! More than once I had to say you dont need to know that level of detail to scuba dive. If she was taking the course with you she would likely not ask any of the questions as she is a bit shy and afraid of asking a dumb question. She knows she can ask me anything though and has no problem exercising that option all the time.

Imagine being her CFI? Yikes

CFI?

they'll have to bring their a game! She'll also weed out the ones that know what they're doing from the ones that don't.
Looking at those questions, there are exceedingly few instructors out there who know the answers to those questions off the top of their head, and even fewer who can give full explanations. Only one I would have missed is the history of the names of the gases themselves. I know argon essentially comes from the greek word for "lazy" because it doesn't react with anything, and radon had something to do with radiation, but after that I'm out.

She got me stumped on a couple things. The fill the tank until it is a solid had me scratching my head. I normally think of matter changing states as temperature dependent and explained it that way, but I had to acquiesce that I was just not sure on her question. I told her probably it would turn to a solid with enough pressure, but since pressurizing a gas creates heat and causes molecules to collide it didn't seem likely because that creates heat which flys in the face of matter cooled goes from gas to liquid to solid. I bailed by saying the tank would explode before you ever got to that point. At the end she smiled and said "was that a good question?"

She had another one that I cant remember which I had to tell her I did not know.

Here is an example of how "in the weeds" she gets on stuff. In the introduction it describes the content gasses in air, and how they will mix to become homogeneous. Then it talks about the individual gasses. Oxygen is highly reactive and will readily combine with other elements. She wanted to know about that so I explained how Oxygen is a element and it can combine with other elements to create different things like H2O, CO2, etc. OK she's all clear and we move on. two sections later they get to the noble gases which they state do not combine with other elements. OK stop! That flys right in the face of what was just talked about! You said that gasses will mix together, but it says here they argon, and neon, etc wont combine. So I then have to go off on this tangential conversation about the differences between gasses mixing in a tank, and elements combining to create completely different things.

I love how she thinks and this will all lead to a much better understanding on her part, but the chapter was just trying to impart a basic knowledge of what is in air, and that gasses mix! She told me the other day that her friend said if you dive really deep you will be crushed and she explained to her friend that that's not true and why, but her friend would not believe her because the TV talked about bone crushing depth.

DEFINITELY not suitable for young ears! Made the fatal mistake of taking my 16 year old daughter and her friend to see a little known Frankie Boyle at The Hexagon in Reading. I spent the whole show wishing the ground would swallow me up. They, of course, loved it!

Yes hilarious but not kids stuff!

I've heard it said that, "All children are born scientists; they ask great questions. Then teachers and mentors beat the inquisitiveness out of them so that they can grow up to be regular people. It's the few kids who refuse to stop asking questions that become scientists." I sure hope she never stops asking questions. Your post sure made my day!

I could not agree more, I hope she never looses this curiosity. Sometimes the questions are just too much but I try not to get outwardly frustrated so she is afraid to ask.

 

[Scraps]

Aviator8--
Thanks for sharing. It's very cool that scuba is giving you and your daughter such quality time.

Are you taking Nitrox now because she wants to be "allowed" to dive to depths where Nitrox can provide benefits as soon as she hits her next birthday--sort of like the kids who get their drivers licenses the very first day they're allowed to?

(I'm assuming depth restrictions are comparable between NAUI and PADI, and 12 is when NAUI says kids can go deeper than 12meters/40feet).

Stand by for intense pressure to take her somewhere special for her first 20 meter dive on her birthday.

BTW, you're way ahead of me on proactivity in daughter dive training. I bought dive lessons for my oldest daughter and her husband as a wedding present. My youngest daughter just got certified this fall, taking the course as a PE class at college--and we had our first dive together last weekend when we brought her home for Christmas break. So good job getting her into diving early.

Best wishes,