The thing about young humans is that they don't yet fully understand all practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics. Like, for example, it might no

The thing about young humans is that they don't yet fully understand all practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics. Like, for example, it might not occur to a child that if you stack 10 textbooks on top of your backpack in your locker — where your laptop/tablet is held in a vertical pocket inside the backpack, and everything else in the backpack is just clothes or something, and so the laptop/tablet is acting as the load-bearing support for all those textbooks — then if you've got an all-plastic device, its chassis will probably flex apart and crack; or if you've got a metal-and-glass device, it'll probably buckle and bend. Learning a basic corollary to a law of physics by breaking something usually feels really embarrassing, though — a "why didn't I expect that that would happen? I must be stupid!" kind of feeling. So kids really don't like to admit it happened. But they really were being careful! They were trying as hard as they could! They just didn't have all the information on what they need to pay attention to to avoid breaking a thing, yet. (And, to be clear, an opaque warning to "never do X" doesn't give them that information, because there's no backing intuition, so while they might remember it in the moment for that specific case, they won't be able to translate it to any related case. What they need is the backing intuition itself — the understanding of the causal process that makes bad things happen, such that if they imagine doing X or Y or Z, then they'll picture the causal process that applies, and so automatically infer for themselves that [unwanted consequence] will follow.) --- Tangent, in the mode of a game designer: There are many "practical, everyday corollaries to the laws of physics" that a child will just learn from interacting with the world. And for others, there are common "learning toys" you can buy for children that teach them certain principles. But there are rather a lot of these physical principles that are more niche — plastic deformation under stress of seemingly-rigid bodies being one of them — where you just won't personally observe them in a regular childhood (unless your parents are nerds who like watching "historical failures of engineering" documentaries), and where it's hard for regular physical toys to model them. (A physical toy demonstrating plastic deformation would necessarily be single-use!) Growing up myself, I (subconsciously) learned a lot about these more niche corollaries in my tween years, from playing with physics-sim computer games in my middle-school computer lab. I feel like physics-sim games were a great supplement to my ability to predict the physical world. There are real simulational "set things up and see what happens when you press Go" sandbox 'games' that should be standard issue for every school-issued laptop/tablet, because kids can play with them and end up learning getting a feel for these principles that are hard to end up with personal experience with otherwise. There are also real games, that actually gamify the process of developing intuitions around more specific principles. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Poly Bridge, etc. They won't teach you the math, but you'll be very ready to learn the math, far ahead of the kids who just see opaque formulae without the intuitive sense for what it's doing. But, as far as I'm aware, there's no physics-sandbox that models plastic deformation of materials, let alone a game that gamifies the process of developing an intuition for it. (Poly Bridge might simulate stress/strain and buckling at the joints, but it won't give you any sense for the fact that a seemingly rigid body like a steel girder can end up crumpling like a wet paper bag under enough compressive stress, or pulling like taffy under enough tensile stress.) And that's a shame. Someone should develop one. Maybe then kids would stop stacking books on their backpacks.