This would have been a nice video, were it not for the last frame. "Girls are more than princesses... they are our greatest resource." Nice. Not sexist at all, 'cause it says nice things about girls.

But it does bring an interesting point: "at age 7, girls begin to lose confidence in math and science". I wish there was a source to that, because the way I remember it when I was a kid, math and science weren't exactly popular subjects among any of the 7-year old kids I met, but this is something I can relate to. I actually am an engineer (EE), studied a lot of hard math and use a lot of hard math in my day job. But, were it not for a complexity of factors that basically boiled down to "You can either do programming, which you like, so it's not a big deal, or you can study history and starve happy", I wouldn't have gone into this job. Were it to base my decision solely on what I did in school, before university, I'd have gone into something as far removed from mathematics and physics as possible.

For all my pre-university years I have hated mathematics with a passion. The queen of all sciences that promised to open many doors to understanding the universe largely consisted of various ways in which to (tediously) do things we have calculators for during the first eight years, and then of various ways in which to (tediously) do things that don't say anything about the universe. Physics, which supposedly had to be about explaining how the world works, was largely about how quickly trains reach cities and the greatest skill I was taught there was reasoning about why the results you get in real life are an order of magnitude away from what you get on paper. Due to my passion for astronomy, I knew there was more to Physics, but I was so utterly disgusted with Mathematics that one of the main reasons I chose EE instead of CompSci was that I wanted to make sure they don't put math in my coding. In retrospect it was actually a good decision, but for different reasons.

Enter first year EE now, where the first thing you do is these two semesters of advanced fucking calculus (background: where I live, there's a good proportion of calculus that's actually done in high school. Most Calculus I courses I've seen in American universities actually cover what is 11th and 12th grade material around here). Now, I wasn't afraid of them -- I hated mathematics, but not being stupid, I was good enough at it. But holy mother of numbers now it made sense.

Now the other thing you do along with those two semesters of calculus is two semesters of Physics. Well shit: mechanics now made sense. But it was actually a combination of factors that made it make sense.

The first one was Philosophy. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why people thought Newton was such a genius, nor why classical mechanics was considered to be so beautiful. It wasn't until put in its proper context that I understood how incredible Newton's contributions were. No one bothers to tell school kids about how people thought that the natural state of objects was rest, not motion, and that it wasn't until Newton figured out that and how to mathematically talk about changing quantities that we could understand how and why bodies move. Now it felt like Physics and Mathematics were true to their promises; prior to that, it seemed to me that they were just these boring, obnoxious tools adults built because they lacked intuition.

The other one was analytical mechanics but that's probably not as important.

Four years of EE later, I finally began to grasp what really was fascinating about math and science. They allowed me to do a lot of things: reason about the world around me and about how correct my reasoning is, provide a framework upon which to build and test inventions and help me think about why we do some of the things we do.

None of these are even remotely touched before university. Granted, they can't be done rigorously before the basics are laid out, but at least some basic treatment should be there. But no. All everyone, girls and boys learn, is how to solve for x, never even suspecting that the real challenge and beauty is in formulating problems in terms of "solve for x".