The article basically debunks itself with the correction at the end, but tries to hang on by claiming "Look! It has seeds!"
However, I don't see one mention of "artistic license" as a plausible explanation of why it may have seeds, or why it may be depicted as being more ripe.
It was at this point I realized the entire premise of the article was a very long-winded way of saying "I like using high DPI monitors when I code". And then tossing in a bunch of technical details to make it sound like a "fact".
You've accepted your lapse, but you don't seem to accept any further responsibility to stop this from happening in the future. Instead, you're putting this responsibility on countless websites that YOU think are inappropriate for your daughter. The burden is on you. Own it.
I think this is a perfect example of why people find math hard. Not because there's something inherently difficult, but because we have teachers like this one in charge of open and curious minds at a young age. You get a teacher who doesn't quite understand what it is she's trying to teach, and this confusion is multiplied over and over again for each batch of students that pass through. Not too long afterwards you get kids who think they don't understand math, when in fact it was a failing of the teachers who couldn't correctly explain it in the first place.
Why did they build the entire pinball machine themselves? The portion that "plays itself" is a camera attached to some very basic computer vision techniques that boil down to:
When ball detected in flipper area, flip.
You could attach this to any commercial machine by connecting a relay where the flipper buttons would be.
I don't think it's unreasonable to be surprised that a teenager (at least, an American teenager) isn't aware of such a thing. They've managed to get through school without once being shown a photo of the space shuttle? Not one blurb? Never seen it in a TV commercial? Photograph?
This is fantastic. I've had a very similar idea kicking around in my head for a very long time.
These days it seems impossible to make sense of all the predictions from so-called experts. Tracking the accuracy of the talking heads is a great place to start measuring just how valuable their information is.
She developed a prototype based on a hunch and a whim. Great work, no doubt, but engineering isn't based on intuition and some experience. Real engineering has a goal or specification in mind, and then proves through modeling, analysis, and _finally_ testing that it meets those specs.
Whipping something up and then seeing what it's capable of doesn't qualify.