12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research

The payoff of this article is even better than the headline hints at; I was expecting the kid to be involved in some interesting, but relatively peripheral way. The kid's idea was actually central, and the kid apparently did the bulk of the work, too. Really fun reading.

Seems like the writeup in TFA missed an opportunity to educate us about how to involve youngsters in science, breezing over how "He persuaded Julian’s teacher to give him some time away from school to test his ideas for himself".

Seems to me that that is where the real broad-appeal lesson lies.

Good job on the dads part for talking about cognitive processing at the dinner table to his 12 year old son! When you treat adolescents like thinking adults, they almost always prove themselves to be extremely capable. So many people see the result of treating adolescents like imbeciles that can't be trusted with the simplest things and just conclude that it must be a natural property of being that age, it's really sad.

And kudos to young Mr. Levy for thinking creatively enough to bring us new insights into the workings of the human mind!

A link to the full paper:

http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10...

Great work from a 12 (or did it say 14?) year old.

Ghostbusters' Vigo had prior art.