My buddy's 8 year old daughter pointed out that my river systems don't make any sense

I was showing her my latest map, all proud of the mountain ranges and coastlines. She just looked at it for a second and said 'but water flows down, not up.' I mean, I know that obviously. But looking at my rivers, I had some splitting and going in directions that made zero sense if you actually think about gravity. Been drawing maps for like 4 years and a kid caught what I was doing wrong in 10 seconds. Has anyone else had that moment where someone with zero map experience spotted something obvious you were messing up?

2 comments

2 Comments

amy69224d ago

That thing about the kid calling out the rivers really hit home with me. "Water flows down, not up" is such a simple fact but easy to overlook when you're focused on making the map look cool. I had a similar moment a while back when my niece looked at a diagram I was drawing of a house's foundation. She said, "Why is the dirt going up there?" and I realized I had the slope working backward, so rain would run right into the crawlspace instead of away from it. It's humbling when someone who doesn't know the technical stuff sees the basic logic you missed. Sometimes the simplest eyes catch the biggest mistakes, and that kid probably saved you from a lot of future headaches with that river system.

joseph_hart24d ago

Has anyone thought about how this connects to why so many of us struggle with teaching simple concepts to adults? We get so wrapped up in fancy details and technical terms that we forget the basics even exist lol. That kid's question probably stuck because it stripped away all the mapmaking fluff and got right to the heart of what a river actually does.