Funny... My son loved maps. When he was around 5yo, we used to hide things around the neighborhood, draw treasure maps and later go and find them. It was more for fun then anything, didn't really go as far as triangulating exact positions but getting the general idea of landmarks and how to use them to spot yourself. It didn't cross my mind that he was learning an outdated skill.
I wonder how much truth is there in the idea that these things can be justified by indirectly training cognitive capacities and introducing basic conceptual building blocks, even when the skills themselves rarely if ever go to good use (A.K.A. The same justification as calculus or handwriting).
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