Slashdot Mirror
Lego Vs. Meccano & Engineering Knowledge
Anonymous In Indy writes "How much of our learning comes from the toys we play with? Nobel prize winner Sir Harry Kroto (Chemistry, 1996) feels that the falling popularity of Meccano and the rise of Lego is inextricably linked to "the demise of British engineering." "Meccano teaches engineering and architectural skills in a way that Lego doesn't. If we had more Meccano, we would have railways that worked. There would be more engineers with better basic understanding." The Sunday Telegraph has the complete story. (USAians note: Meccano = Erector Set."
Meccano motorcycle
Of course, I consider the meccano one to be 7 hundred times more appealing than the lego one. But, I played much more to lego than meccano, and ended-up as a computer engineering guy (the reason I didn't liked the meccano was that you often have to fold pieces, which is an undoable operation. Same reason why I like software, you recycles the same bits ad nauseum). My slightly older brother was more appealed by the meccano stuff, and, (coincidence ?) is an electrical engineer and actually able to use a hammer drill without wounding himself.
Anyway, the meccano models have a Jules Verne look that is probably outdated now. And are fascinating, but fscking expensive.
About the crux of the article, I think that child choose their games, so that demise of meccano is more like a 'don't want to have to screw things together'. If all school were making their computer science course on C, we'll end up with programmers that actually know what memory allocation is. But the java wave will make all this obsolete, and we'll have garbage collectors in the kernel. Sure, some of us will still be ramble about how everything started to slip down when C replaced assembly, but putting a C compiler in the hand of everyone won't change much.
Something I am surprised not to see pointed in the article is that a lego model take a few dozen of minutes to be done, while a meccano one take hours. Attention span seems to get shorter and shorter, which may explain why child would prefer lego...
Cheers,
--fred
Simon Bennett here. I just thought I would add that the letter I wrote was addressing the specific case of using Lego or Meccano in schools. I think Lego does a much better job of supporting teachers and, crucially, is much quicker to put together than Meccano. This makes it better for educational purposes. In my experience those who denigrate Lego are older people who remember their Meccano and are unaware of the functionality of today's Lego, particularly Technic, Mindstorms and Dacta. If I am a worse engineer than a chap of my age would have been in the '50s I blame my educators and my industry. Construction toys really just serve as a hook and as far as I'm concerned I was definitely hooked into Engineering by Techical Lego.
"As part of the Gnome project, we have been trying to come up with a new development platform and a number of tools and components that would make it easier for people to develop applications," said Miguel de Icaza, Ximian's CTO and president of the Gnome Foundation. "And with .NET coming along we now have something that works correctly."
As quoted on InfoWorld
-D
My friend's son has a lego sports car, out of the "Technic" series of kits. This thing is actually quite impressive. Working shifting mechinism+gearbox (5 speeds plus reverse), rack and pinion, a differential to drive the tires, even operating doorhandles with hydraulics to make the door rise (Like a delorian).
This is equal to or more advanced than most of my old erector set kits.
Lego Technic and Construx
Technic was halfway between Lego and Meccano/Erector: It had the standard Lego modular pieces (it's easy to mix Technic and Lego parts in the same item), but it also had elements much more geared towards engineering like gears, shafts, and motors. And then there was the Technic Control Centre. It was the ancestor of Mindstorms, a console that could record and play back sequences of actions involving up to 3 motors. It came with enough parts to build a programmable vector plotter (among other things).
Construx was by Fisher-Price (sadly it seems to be discontinued now), and it was sort of a plastic version of the Erector set minus the annoying nuts and bolts. It was on a much larger scale than most of the toys that have been discussed so far: it was easy to build items several feet tall (aside from structural problems), and the motors were beefier than the ones Technic used.
When I was but a wee lad, Lego came out with their first Castle Kit - no custom blocks, but a lot of the standard "thin" ones, all in yellow, and a bunch of hinges so the castle could be opened up to see inside.
My friends and I all got one set for Xmas one year, and we quickly determined a game to play with them. The idea was to build a castle that would withstand a Lego siege. You built a castle, and then you built a catapult, all out of Lego. The only non-Lego part allowed was a rubber band to make the catapult work.
We'd then take turns launching Lego bolders against each other's castles from little Lego catapults, ballistae, and even an attempt at a trebuchet.
It taught us all kinds of things: how to build high walls that don't fall down (hint: buttresses), why walls had to interlock, the virtues of flat vs high missile trajectories, the tradeoffs between missile velocity vs missile mass, basic aiming techniques, and the strength of various household objects when subjected to accidental Lego bombardment (brick wall - high; glass lamp - low)
It was great fun until one of us figured out that a solid, interlocked and buttressed tower was pretty well impervious to anything short of a pellet gun, and then our attentions turned elsewhere - shooting each other with pellet guns, as I recall.
Great fun, and a complete engineering education.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
That's what I always disliked of Lego, because in my country the first Lego sets that appeared in the toystores were the new kits. Sadly, here Lego displaced the TENTE, a much better and flexible system (IMO) that have little holes in the center of the plugs, even sometimes a broken piece was more useful than its complete counterpart, and always all the pieces ad the same proportions, unlike Lego.
DISCLAIMER: English is not my first language, if you want to correct my grammar or orthography, you are welcome.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Touch\'e.
Amen brother! Back When I Was A Lad the fanciest Lego piece was the thin 2x2 square. You really had to struggle to make something look realistic from the dozen or so pieces.
Some of the modern Lego kits have 50 unique Lego pieces, only found in one kit, and only suitable for making one specific model. The result is one extremely realistic model, but where was the fun in building it?
I'll tell you why the quality of British engineering has declined: because Engineers are treated terribly in the UK. For a start, "Engineer" isn't a protected title, as it is in the US and even in Europe, where it has similar standing to the title of a medical doctor. In the UK, the electrician who installs your cable TV probably calls himself an "Electrical Engineer". If someone asks you what you do for a living and you say "Mechanical Engineer", in the UK they will think you are a car mechanic. (These are of course necessary and worthy jobs, but you don't need a 4-year degree and 4 years of professional experience to do them, as you do to become an Engineer). Also, an Engineer in the UK is unlikely to be well paid, compared to a similarly qualified lawyer or finance professional.
I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCL, one of the top 3 universities in the UK, and like many of my graduating class, I didn't even apply to engineering firms. We went straight into consulting, banking, software and similar jobs - where our talents would be respected and rewarded.
I believe that these factors are more important than Lego -vs- Meccano. Remember, we all started off *wanting* to be Engineers - it was only when we realised what it was really like that we changed our minds.
As an American who has been to Britain, I have to say that in comparison, riding on a British train is a divine experience of pleasure.
When you're on AmTrack, you want to put your head on the rails in front of an oncoming train, rather than be forced to actually ride on board.
You whiney Brits don't know how good you have it.
The US used to be the greatest rail network in the world. Now, there is only one passenger line, and it's federally funded. Last time I rode, what would have been a 3 hour drive was an 8 hour hellish ordeal via rail. American passenger trains are loud, slow, bumpy, and have crappy seats, and poor service. British trains are smooth, luxurious and quick by comparison. And they actually name the individual engines all these strange names like "The Duke of Wolverton" etc. Just like in Thomas the Tank Engine.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Who says Lego (Technic or otherwise) doesn't encourage invention? Check out some of the sites on LUGnet's Cool LEGO Site of the Week.
You don't have to "progress". Even the basic building blocks are complicated and versitile enough to be an artistic medium for adults, and the more complicated Technic and Mindstorms stuff is better than any Erector Set I've seen.
This is simply not true. There is nothing wrong with privatisation per se. The problem comes when you don't have sufficient guards against abuse. That essentially means a regulatory body with the power to act in the best interests of the consumer. Here in the UK, we did the privatisation bit, but forgot to give the regulators enough power to do anything useful. Hence the current mess with trains, phones and half a dozen other utilities. The regulators need to be able to do whatever it takes to protect the consumer, up to and including the financial ruin of the company running the service. Until that happens, things are only going to get worse :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I can understand him somehow as I have similar feelings about a german system called Fischer Technik that has almost disappeared from german toy stores in the last 10 years. While not as complicated as Meccano (no screws and stuff) the constructions were more stable, the motors bigger...
In other words, Fischer Technik allowed you to build larger and more complex things (after all the first sets were made for industrial models, and that's what it is still used for today). It also pioneered many things that Lego had done only years later: sets for pneumatic, electronic circuits and a programmable computer interface.
Compare and contrast the following with particular attention to the continuing absence of pragmatism and rigour in modern political theory:
I've been keeping this a secret, but you can built just about anything in a few minutes with hot glue and toothpicks. Towers, bridges, cantilevers, I've done it all.
Start with a board as the base, put drops of glue on the corners of a square one toothpick wide, put in 4 toothpicks as verticals, and connect them horizontally to form a cube. Repeat to build box girders, etc. You can add diagonal braces as needed.
Hot glue is about the best thing every made for connecting small wooden structural members - strong, flexible, and it sets almost instantaneously. You can also melt the glue with the point of the glue gun to add additional 'picks to a joint, or to disassemble it.
It can be a little bit too flexible for some things, but if the point is to get some experience with structural design, it's ideal.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Sounds like the Internet, too.
Of course, I don't really care--if someone puts little pieces together to form bigger pieces, I consider it engineering. Doesn't explain "Sanitation Engineering" though, does it?
10 years latter, a lot less hair on my head, my Uni degree in Mechanical Engineering is almost finished, yet I still like looking at the current Lego systems now and then . Over those 10 years the Lego has increased its price dramatically and decreased the number of parts in each kit, so the value of Lego kit was hit two fold.
You can now get a Playstation 1 for the price of a good Lego kit (one more than 10 parts). If you gave your kid a choice these days would they choose a Playstation 1 or a Lego kit, 99.99% sure they will pick the Playstation.
If Lego charged half the price add double the pieces, which would most likely still give them very huge profit margins on each box, people might start seeing some value in it and they might start shipping some of there stock.
>You say any kid would go for the PSX over Lego. More to do with price, Playstation was say $1000 when it first started selling it is now $150 (Aus), a big decrease. Lego is over $150 per good kit of technic lego. If your a kid what would you want, 9/10 the kid will choose the Playstation. On the other hand if it was say $60 and the kid had to choose between a Sony Playstation game or technic Lego kit, then maybe the kid will choose the Lego kit.
> And, no, adding more pieces would not necessarily profitable in the long term.
t depends if it will sell a lot more boxes, if a technic lego kit was say $60 (Aus), I would bet you would get a dramatic increase in sales.. Then again I am sure Lego would have done studies on this, so most likely I am wrong.
For the point of view of the Lego advocates, see this post which contains a letter written to the New Civil Engineer journal in the UK, by Simon Bennett.
This article also contains links to a longer thread preceeding the letter itself.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Alas, I despair for the world of technology. Understanding assembler goes hand in hand with understanding computer architecture. If you do not have at least a basic understanding of computer architecture, then I find it very scary that you could even graduate from a B.S. in CS program.
I despair for the world of computer science when atavists from the land of vacuum tubes demand that the curriculum of science be tied forever to a particular technology. Although current computer architecture is a fine realization of Von Neumann's theories, it just doesn't have any useful relation to computer science theory, like algorithmic complexity, decidablilty, graph theory, induction, and all the other math that goes into computer science. Saying asm is foundational to computer science is like saying using a HP calculator is fundamental to mathematics. Dijkstra, one of the gods of computer science, hates computers.
I submit learning asm isn't even terribly useful for programming (except in C), but that's another argument entirely.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
After Legos, you progress to Tinker Toys, then to Meccanos (called "Erector Sets" in the States).
Hell no, Legos, Tinker Toys, then Zome.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I got mine back before there were any computer interfaces (Like 1978-80ish), but I did have several of the motor packs and you could do all sorts of *amazing* things given all the pulleys, gearboxes, and chain linkages they gave you. I have my original set in an attic and have recently decided that it's time to dust it off and bring it down so that *my* daughter can enjoy the same eye-opening experience. It's probably no coincidence that I owned a Fischer Technik set as a child and ended up getting an engineering degree...
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
With one, you build houses, castles, cities, and the other, you build cars with steering, differentials and gearboxes & cranes.
How can both be mixed?
And you don't play the same with either; with meccano, you have to design subassemblies and make sure they come together the first time. How many times did I have to "redesign" one whole side of an assembly, because one shaft could not go through another one on the same plane?
With Lego, you just stick bricks together; no gears, no shafts, no mechanical subassemblies...
They're like apples and oranges!
However, for having drooled for many years on my granfather's number 10 Meccano set (a 80cm by 40cm by 30 cm wooden chest chock-full of meccano parts (and finally inherited it), Meccano is a fine toy to learn industrial mechanical design, whilst Lego can be a fine architectural toy.
But how can both be mixed???
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Give me a break. Data entry? Have you ever written anything somewhat complex in Java? Doubtful.
Just like you have to think differently about coding when you do assembly language, you have to think on a different plane when designing Java apps. Object relationships, interfaces, dependencies, etc. are all something you need to put into your design, instead of knowing what's on the stack or what registers are holding what values. These are the things you "hand off" to the Sun developers, worrying about the specifics of your OOP app. It's surely programming, though a different type of programming.
If when coding a Java app I used the assembly (or even C) part of my programming brain I would be doing things wrong in many cases. To take into account registers or memory addresses when designing an OOP app is something you shouldn't need to do, and for good reason. The only case where a C background _really_ helps with Java programming task is when you're dealing with object references, which are analagous to pointers. However, such a concept is easily learned and understood by non-C programmers. Demonstrating CS algorithms is better done in a high level language in most cases, so that's not a good argument either.
An understanding of assembly language and computer architecture is definitely essential to warrant a Computer Science degree, I couldn't agree more. However, to downplay Java as not being "programming" is a ridiculous statement that shows a lack of understanding of the whole point of component based/OO programming.
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Elitist. If they're going to class, they have the intention of learning. It's not their fault that your school has been unable to get them to a level in which you'd consider them worthy of your almighty company.
Graduating from school lacking knowledge is one thing (and is often not the fault of the person graduating,) but people who are annoyed at their classmates for not spending all their free time learning computer algorithms piss me off.
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And those of you who are so stupid to have to learn algorithms piss me off. You're just bitter that you have to study. Some of undestand with little or no problem.
If all algorithms were easily understood by people with "little or no problem" then we'd have them all from the day the computers were there to perform them. It seems to me that you haven't expanded your algorithm knowledge past the binary tree or the bubble sort, or else you'd realize that you can dedicate years of your life to understanding and building upon a single algorithm.
You've proven you're foolishness immediately by your very first statement. To even make the claim that every student in a class has the intention to learn is ridiculous, apparently you haven't been to school at all.
Yeah, I go to school. I go to Cornell. I go to many CS classes at Cornell. Nobody is in a CS class to fuck around once you get past the first couple weeder classes. If a classmate has no experience with C or a merge sort, I'm not going to jump on them as being inferior because I learned that stuff in my spare time. They have experiences in things outside of my realm of knowledge, and I'd expect the same respect from them.
You are the one who has obviously never been to school, or at least, partook in a competitive academic program where everyone there is taking their education seriously and keeping you on your toes.
You throw it around like it's a dirty word, I'm proud of my ability, and of course I look down on anyone who can't compete.
I think you probably need a reality check, because you're not so superior as you think. I'm pretty sure all of the people I've met at school (largely professors) who I've considered as being truly labeled as being "smart" have never read, or would bother reading, Slashdot. They're too busy doing more important things, like studying and expanding upon those algorithms that you seem to understand with "little or no problem."
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You implied I've never been to school, dumbass. I was telling you where I go to school.
.. I was talking about in their abilities within CS. You have most likely never been in the same room as someone who is fundamentally talented at CS (and who would excel in any engineering science) because you would not take such an over-inflated view on your CS abilities.
You said what I read as "some of us understand with little or no problems" in reference to algorithms, which implies that you think that all algorithms are alike and understanding them is a skill which you either have or don't have, and is one you have. These things are all not true.
We were talking about the ability to understand computer science, perhaps I was being vague when I mentioned that my professors are the only ones who can be labeled as "smart"
My final point was that your presence on this website almost definitely excludes you from the small sect of people in society who are naturally good at CS, simply because in my experience Slashdot is a pseudo-technical site that in lots of ways lacks any real intellectual discussion or content. Not that I don't enjoy it, but it's surely uninteresting to these smarties I'm talking about.
I have come to the conclusion that you are 15 years old, BTW.
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I understand that when Meccano's UK operations closed in 1979, their French branch bought the whole thing and carried on production. I (living in France), vaguely remember relatively recent (mid 90s ?) marketing efforts to make it popular again, and also hearing about it finaly shutting up the Calais factory too, or being about to.
On that subject, the person who deserves the title "sanitation engineer" is not the garbage man. It's the person who actually has to design the landfill and waste handling systems. This is actually an engineering job that most people don't even think about.
They were always smiling as well. Even after dying heroic deaths in inter-galactic battles. I was convinced they were plotting something, in my lego box under my bed, late at night.
They probably still are, just hidden away in my parents roof, undisturbed for the last 15 years.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
Nowadays, Lego comes in HUGE custom pieces. The sheer number of blocks you get in a Lego set these days is tiny compared to when I was 10. It involves a lot less thinking.
Maybe you should stop buying Belville sets then?
Seriously, I've been able to build things of increasing sophistication lately thanks to newer Lego pieces. There are small Technic pieces that didn't exist ten years ago along with new joints and other bits that let Lego freaks like me build very small to very large-scale mecha-type things that simply wouldn't have been possible before. Surf through Brickshelf sometime, and then come back and try to push your notions around.
If you can't find a different use for those "HUGE" custom pieces, well then I'd have to say you simply lack the imagination to do so.
----- The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they will be when you kill them.
If games would affect kids then by think of all the "pacman" playing there where in the 80's.
That would mean that we would by now have a bunch of teenagers running around in dark rooms, listening to monotonous music and eating pills..
And this would be different from a rave, how?
Well, fischertechnik is kinda like "technic lego" . It's more popular in europe than america. Most home robotics enthusiasts in the 80s in Ireland (where I am), England and Germany used fischertechnik kits to build their robots that they hooked up to their BBC Micros and C64s.
See www.techeducation.com for american distributors. They have a cool robot arm kit.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Almost completely off-topic (although someone did mention Doctors), is the UK the only place where they refer to medical consultants as (using a male example) "Mr" instead of "Dr"? Sometimes it can be quite un-nerving, feeling like they have dragged someone in off the street to check out your heart ....
What one should get from a CS degree is understanding, which necessarily involves almost every level of a system. Any physicist can learn to program, but most don't understand why, say, the order of nested loops matters when jumping through an array. Some theoreticians come up with elegant algorithms that are beaten by simpler ones which use a smaller working set. Machine language programmers sometimes lose sight of the fact that a better data structure would do more for performance than any pipeline optimization they can come up with. And C programmers can be baffled by the fact that their distributed system breaks despite the lack of obvious bugs on any single machine.
So, I agree that there are no "universal truths" to be discovered by assembly language programming. But you would go too far to say that there isn't any insight to be gained by being familiar enough with that level to do so--- after all, even in his new revision of the Art of Computer Programming, Knuth decided it was still worth expressing things in an assembly-like language to truly understand what the real performance costs were.
Now, you may have been trying to make the point that all these are really "software engineering" concerns, but I disagree that computer science is only the mathematical parts--- without the practical angle, CS is only so much hot air and might as well stay part of the math department.
(I don't like the newer Lego stuff with all the funny shaped pieces. I haven't decided whether it's because you really can't build anything other than the model they suggest with them, or whether I'm too old and dumb to come up with creative uses.)
Thats so true. I rember when I was very young making space ships from the red angular roof tiles, then they came out with "Space Legos" with al sorts of fancy custom pieces, and little people.....
They also have some "technical" legos with motors and gears, or at least they used to.
To blame the downfall of British engineering on toys is wrong. British engineering is facing increased competition form abroad. To generalize, which is always dangerous, British engineering has been fairly innovative (box bridges, those reflective things on highways.....) but sometimes not as thorough and reliable. Look at the former British car companies for an example to see this problem is far from new..
In general though, through out the world engineers are under paid and under appreciated. (software "engineers" being an exception..)
Anyone else remember a building set called Riveton or Rivetron, from the late 70s? It had a bunch of plastic panels, tubes, and corner joints, all with holes in them, as well as special parts like wheels. You used a special gun to connect the parts together by means of little rubber rivets that were stretched into the holes. Very cool - I made some neat little racing carts and vehicles for my action figures with these. As I recall, the tech was taken off the market after some little kid choked on one of the rubber rivets.
My other favorite building toy (apart from Lego), was my "Girder & Panel" set that could be used to throw down some very cool-looking high rises and similar neubauten. I ended up using this stuff many years later to construct some very cool-looking scenery for SF miniatures gaming (the scale was different, but it still looked great).
I only had a brief run-in with erector sets, and I think I was too young to really appreciate it -- probably about 4-6 -- but from what I remember, I concur with others, that erector sets really do emphasize real-world mechanical skills more than other toys...
I mean, hey, it's not as if they don't have amazing constructions made of lego -- Legoland in Windsor only has millions of bricks worth of famous attractions, cars, trains, boats, and LOCKS that really work, pumping water up and down and everything. English engineers should be inspired by Legoland, which is just outside London...
You mean Mighty Morphine Flower Arrangers.
- its own computing platform (primitive as it may be)
- you may desing models that actually look good (better than Meccano at least)
- may design modells that can carry a lot of load ( more than Lego at least )
My favorite allways was the 3 foot high oil drilling plattform that I used as a ladder to reach my upper bookshelves. (geekcode s+:+)Um, if you'd actually had kids, you'd realise that the point of Legos is to give small kids (the type who'd promptly eat all those little nuts and bolts) something that takes some motor skills, but not that many motor skills. It's one step up from building blocks. After Legos, you progress to Tinker Toys, then to Meccanos (called "Erector Sets" in the States).
The failure of the British Rail System is political in nature. Let's not shift the failings of politicians off onto engineers, and let's not get any more of that "you younger generations are causing the decline of civilisation" nonsense. The younger set didn't invent nukes, spread herpes and aids, or listen to Bryan Ferry.
The main advantage of K'nex over Meccano is that it does not require all that dexterity to put those tiny bolts and nuts together. A secondary advantage of K'nex over all those others is price. You can buy an awful lot of K'nex for two hundred bucks.
Personally, I don't like the K'nex robot building stuff very much. There is no way to write your own software. Lego Mindstorm stuff is probably much better than the K'nex attempts at intelligent components.
Yes. Except: The average person at a Rave missed PacMan by about 3 years.
Before New Zealand's power and rail systems were privatised, they were a shambles. NZRail employed people who did nothing but maintain disused stretches of track - what a waste of my money and on a service I don't even use.
Just a small point.
You may still benefit from the existence of rail travel options even if you don't use them yourself.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
See, if you pay attention to the creaking and bending in your lego crane, you learn what to do to make it non-creaky on your next version. That was always the best part of lego, imho. Way better than erector sets because you don't have the mindless tedium of putting it together with nuts and bolts, but you can get the same effect. Plus, since lego has less inherent structural strength, you had to build better and smarter to get the same effect.
itachi
I am an American, or a "citizen of the United States of America." Please do not use the term "USian" (or the new, misspelled term "USAian") to describe citizens of the United States of America.
The United States of America is one of the most influential nations in the world, and as such it may be abbreviated to just "America." Canadians often feel that they are short-changed by the global press, whereas it is the truth that Canada is not a very influential country. Canadians are very good at hockey, and their woefully underpopulated country makes the UN's list of top places to live (in a vain attempt by the UN to get people to live there), but the true opportunities are in the United States of America.
Thank you, and have an excellent week.
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That's right. The Russians are kicking themselves for not introducing the Radioaktivo backyard nuclear reactor kit for kids back in the '50s, after that whole Chernobyl thing.
what do you know, that works... and here I've been using just slashdot.org this whole time... it seems that slashdot.com works, too... scary.
[/OT nonsense]
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I'm going to turn it around and say: This new type of pencil can draw--
straight lines
circles
regular polygons
and many More!
to which you then add a sardonic: *yawn*
Please don't miss this one point. You can't produce the angles required to make regular polyhedra with Meccano or Lego. At least not easily. This is a huge limitation and is like having a pencil that can draw a square but not a equilateral triangle. Ask yourself why is it that most people can recognize the basic shapes of 2-d space just as equilateral triangles and squares but not name the basic 3-d shapes such as the tetrahedron or rhombic dodecahedron. Now look at the construction toys we played with as a kid.
I'm not out to spoil a child's fun by making it, "eew-- educational". But rather just the opposite, the Lego and to a lesser extent Meccano tend fix all the angles to 90 degrees and there is a infinite universe of possibilities that are outside the reach of these systems. The Cartesian coordinate system for the "squares" in the education system.
I'll let you in on a little secret. I play with construction toys that I listed above and I find the deep symmetries that I can make with them very pleasing. I wish I had them when I was a (young) kid too.
Quite right you can, but as you say there are disadvantages. It's kudgy compared to how other construction toys do it.
I'm not dumping on Meccano, its a fine system, and I am dumping on Lego, simply because it has managed to bully just about every other construction toy off store shelves. Having only one construction toy is like having only one mode of thought. Different systems require that the child use different mental skills. As they offer some of the best play and educational value of any class of toy, there should be plenty of room in the toy box for many different types of sets.
I recommend at least building set where the angles are an emergent property rather than an assumption that is built in. The Roger's Connection set with its ball bering hubs would be a good example. One of the first things you notice when you build stuff is that most of the angles between the rods tends to be 60 degrees and not 90!
Here are a few alternatives:
Zometools are like a bit like tinker-toys but allow a greater number angles at the hubs and are much better thought out. They also have a large collection of online lesson plans for educators that are free for the downloading.
Roger's connections and Mega Magz take the concept further by using ball barings as hubs and magnetic rods allowing for an even more flexible joint and rod system.
How about having children explore this kind of this cool construction technique, like the artist Ken Snelson.
Check out Chuck Hoberman's Expandagon construction toy where the parts expand and contract causing the construction to transform from one shape, to
another.
Yes, it's just like saying you don't need math if you have a calculator. Well, those that know math are much more effective with their calculator.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
on the whole, I liked Legos more. Why? Well, the erector set was far more challenging and interesting., but in order to join two simple objects, I had to dig through to find the parts, then sort through screws to find the proper length, then deal with my poor coordination to screw them together, crossthreading the nut onto the screw several times before I finally got it right. Then I could move on to the next one.
Although that IS very much how large engineering projects go, it is frustrating for younger people to have to deal with such things.
Legos do involve less thought, but trade that for quicker gratification. By the time I had joined a couple of parts with the erector set, I could have most of whatever I was building built out of legos.
Legos also made one think about structure. It is just in a much different way. Legos are inherently of inferior building structure (from the standpoint of structural integrity). You must there for think of how to build something strong enough that you can play with it afterward, while still making it look like what you want. This meant adding support blocks to various areas.
From the other posts here, I don't buy that the increase in the popularity of Legos is the cause of the decrease in quality of engineering in england. I would attribute it to other factors. I know nothing of the English education system, but if it is anything like the one here in the States, it must be getting pretty dismal.
I would wonder if the decrease in the quality of engineers and scientists in the U.S. matches the increase in schools allowing persecuition of anyone who would choose science, math or any other "geeky" subject over taking the minimum requirments, and goofing off the rest of the time.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
Believe it or not, something similar has actually cropped up in AspectJ:
before (): executions (void foo ()) || executions (void goo ()) {
// else continue
System.out.println ("I just came from foo() or goo()");
if (blah) throw new RuntimeException
("You can't do foo or goo if blah is true!");
}
Female Prison Rape in NY
You're confusing "Java" with "popular Java IDEs". Java is, in a lot of parts, C++ with a lot of the interesting ways to shoot yourself in the foot removed and some syntactic clean-up.
I'm doing some things in Java these days, and I haven't downloaded components from anywhere, dragged or dropped anything, or let someone else's IDE glue anything together for me. I write source code with an editor, feed it to the compiler, and feed the byte-code to the run-time.
Java has the problem that the flash IDEs were developed in a very close time-frame to the language, so you never got the huge base of "real" coders that you did for something like C. (Although not as bad as Visual Basic, where the drag-n-drop, write all the code for me version is all you get.)
Take a look at a recent version of MS VisualC++ (or whatever they're calling it these days). With the "build me an app" wizard you can get a working "do-nothing" skeleton program that produces a standard Windows app, menus, widgets, open / save dialogs, cut-n-paste etc without typing a single line of code - in C++!
It's definitely a programming *environment* issue, more than a programming *language* issue.
Regards,
Tim.
I certainly do not really remember cutting myself on the parts. I am sure I cut myself when the screwdriver slipped a few times, but, I would not exactly call it tramatising... nothing a parent really need worry about.
I remember at school being amazed at how kids didn't know how two gears meshing together would work, why they would turn in different direction, why they would turn at different speeds if they weren't the same size. Why a "worm" could not be turned by a sprocket. How kids didn't know which why to turn a screwdriver to tighten or loosen a bolt.
Meccano's biggest folly I think is that it is hard to make "cute" looking things out of it. Lego is very good at doing that with minimal effort. The latest set designs brought about by a change of ownership to a Japanise toy manufacturer has caused parts to be introduced to make those cute models you can with Lego.
Meccano is certainly a lot more tedious, but then again, perhaps its a better metaphor for life because of it?
I remember my disapointment with lego was that you could build something, say a crane, it would then creak and bend as soon as you tried to pick something up with it... if I built a similar model with my Meccano it would actually work as I had invisioned.
Lego is poor in that its all to easy to break the peices if they get trodden on accidentally.
Both are excelent toys however, I can see the person's point that Meccano teaches more about "Engineering" - certainly all the engineers I know think that Meccano is a far better toy to teach engineering with than Lego ever was to them.
Linking that to a failing infrastructure is a little tenuous though. That is as others have said perhaps more politically induced.
Perhaps you are giving a hint about the very fine French railroad system? TGV's and such? Those trains are impressive. London-Marseille in 6,5 hours! The TGV's hold the absolute speed record of 515 km/hour (320 miles/hour)...
-- From Denmark
Again, after 377 comments there's no reason to post this. I'm sure with moderation constraints no one even reads these way down here...
I have noticed that the debate over privatization of railways is fairly heated... mostly at an ideological level perhaps. But curiously there is little input from the American side. I would think with the regulation of "utility" companies in Pennsylvania, New York and (always in the news) California going by the wayside, that there would be more of an uproar from US posters.
Then I realized, the argument is more about the privatization of RAILWAY. And you have to laugh. We don't use our rails here in the US... well, with the exception of some east coast commuter traffic to and from White Plains... for the most part we use our cars. And that's the rub (here's a limited number of points):
(There are other factors... but these will do for my example.) You see, Americans haven't joined this discussion, because we HATE our railway system. It almost NEVER provides any of the above. Oddly enough our system used to do so when it was first created in the 1800s. Each line was privately owned, was cutting edge technology, had dedicated physically independent "lines" (never mind that silly intercontinental stuff), prided itself on being on time EVERY time... and the public loved it.
Now you know where this is going... it started to go terribly wrong after the interstate highway picked up speed (pardon the pun). The train was simply outdated for obvious reasons. The government stepped in and tried to save it. It didn't matter that the public found their cars to be "better" than the train, and had no interest in the lines. So instead of letting the rails die with the horse drawn buggy, we have kept a dinosaur on life support.
Another fine example of government regulation.
Ah... your very own Amtrack. Brittrack, perhaps. Ours keeps begging for money and trying to legitimize itself, as well.
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
A few years ago there was an informal poll of OO programmers. The conclusion was that people who grew up playing with Legos were more likely to be Smalltalk programmers. Those who grew up playing with Meccano were more likely to be C++ programmers. Both groups were pleased with the results and felt it confirmed their point of view.
Personally, I never hand the manual dexterity to put all those tiny little screws together. I suppose that's why I spent most of the past 20 years writing Smalltalk. Is manual dexterity a prerequsite for C++ programmers?
You obviously don't have a grasp on how the enviroment a child grows up in effects his/her mind.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I started out with 'toggle blocks', and then graduated to Lego. After Lego I 'graduated' to Fischer Technik, and then to playing with electromechanical kits, then electronics (TTL stuff) and then to those computery things.
I think a lot of people naturally 'graduate' from one level of complexity and challenge to the next as they wish. (Like this random guy 'Pete'.)
"Lego level" is not somehow less important or less good than the "Fischer Technik (or Mechano) Level". People will seek out their own level of challenge; I'm finding myself thinking about all the people who buy CodeWarrior: Learning Edition (Mac, Win, no *nix yet) for fifty bucks. Had that existed at the time, I probably would have 'graduated' to that (instead of to programming FORTRAN in punch cards on an IBM 370/155.)
-Mark
/*EOF
Doing a quick search on the net i found this (it's in danish) statement from november 2000 where they layed off 300 employees after losing approx 70M usd (500M dkk)
Maybe toys are just to keep us from studying/mimicing our parents which would be better (mostly).
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Forgive me for being over 30. But doesn't this describe a rave? Big dark room, repetitive electronic music, everyone taking ecstacy?
--
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
When i was a kid, i had the choice between Meccano or Lego.
I chose the Lego every time, because somebody had obviously put a lot of thought into it's design - Lego is designed to appeal to kids, Meccano is designed to appeal, well, possibly to British railway engineers?
Meccano's iron material would certainly make for more durable constructions, but the breadth of the Lego offerings - from castles to spaceships, dwarfs Meccano's range.
Lego is not just about encouraging construction skills, it's about encouraging the imagination.
When you build your own spaceship to fly your tiny astronauts to the moon, somehow it's much more real to you than if you were to have been given a ready-made space-ship toy.
And when the engines on your spacecraft fail, and you are forced to make a crash landing on the moon, being able to put your craft back together, perhaps in a new configuration (some parts were too badly damaged by the crash to be repaired) and fly home again is a whole new adventure.
Meccano could arguably supply the same experience, but crashing a meccano ship is just not the same, since they tend not to come apart unless under extreme stress, and then youre looking at permanent damage.
I too lament the recent 'dumbing down' of Lego, going for mechandising tie-ins like with Star Wars instead of creating new designs, but I own the Lego Mindstorms kit, which i plan on giving to my girlfriend's nephew when he's wise enough not to lose all the pieces.
This is a lot of fun to play with (even for a 26-year old software developer like me), and i think it's great that Lego has stepped outside it's traditional market with new and somewhat groundbreaking products.
Meccano vs Lego?
It may be more 'realistic', but there is no way it's more fun.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Fischer Technik is a delightful system. It is not as twistedly versatile as Mecanno, where you can fold and bend pieces in very satisfying ways. It had this very precise feel: things just clicked smoothly if you got them right.
I've always seen Mecanno as mad tinkerer's stuff, and Fischer Technik as the real mechanical engineer's structural toolkit. They can both really open your mind to a lot of things. So can Lego, of course. So can nice building blocks (Cuisenaire Jumbo rods, I had fun with those until I was fifteen).
I have tried and tried to find Fischer Technik in Paris, France. Nobody has been selling it for years. Some stores told me they were handling their own distribution now.
Mecanno is French! So you can be certain Sir Kroto was not biased in its favor.
Hey! My Wife bought me a Mindstorm RIS 1.5 set for my birthday
It true that Lego is a bit less "engineering" than mecanos, but with the whole Mindstorm series, they're going into programming and robotics. It a field with much more interesting potential.
i wonder what other toys led to the decline of western civilization? super soakers, hot wheels, and the Evel Knievel windup motorcycle?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Just because you're the type of person who prefers low level programming doesn't mean all programmers should be low level programmers. I prefer to use higher level languages, I like building GUIs, but I also got good scores in my assembly classes. We had 2 subjects in my CS course with assembly, and I think that's plenty for the average programmer. CE students of course would have more, and they'd also have to take a few EE subjects, because that's what they need in their jobs.
Programmers are supposed to produce solid programs quickly, and clearly it is more efficient to pull from well known and tested components than to rebuild your own wheel every time.
Incidentally, I found that the people who sucked at the assembly classes sucked at all the other classes too. I didn't know anyone who got great scores in one type of programming and scraped thru with a pass in another...
---
I remember playing with both Lego and Meccano when I was a kid. With lego, I had lots of small pieces which I could use to build whatever I wanted. If I got a new lego set, I could mix it with my existing ones and build new objects.
With Meccano, the pieces are so big. If I was building something, I couldn't easily turn that long piece into the short piece I needed. There just wasn't as much fun when you're limited to a small number of greatly varying pieces.
---
Before the Mindstorm came out, I would have been with you 100% on this. But since getting one two xmas's ago I've been saying nothing but 'why didn't lego do this when I was a kid?'. Those custom pieces do, at first, seem pretty useless, but when you start building lego objects that do something other than just sit there, you start finding ways to use those custom pieces because the plain bricks just won't work. There have been times where the custom part contained in a kit is what decided which kit I buy, just because the custom part looked like it may be useful in my own projects.
LRJ
I'm sorry, but I give contrux the credit for my love of engineering - I feel it taught design better than lego.
Wheeeee
I have to agree to this, in fact I was reading down hoping to be the first that said it. The last good innovation from lego was the expert builder series, when they first came out with shafts and gears, since then the pieces have been getting more and more specialized, to the point of uselessness. But in all fairness, if you have acces to a genuine Gilbert Erector Set, look in the section in the back of the plan book where they sell little plastic parachutes for your carnival rides and such, Building toys have always tended toward specialization as they age. I think the problem lies more in societies trend towards specialization which is manifested in the toys.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
My son has a collection of these "custom lego sets" . He simply puts them all into one big box and creates his own designs with all available parts. Initially I tried to get him to keep the sets apart, but soon found that this way is much better!
Alas, I *do* remember cutting myself, and I never managed to accidently destroy a lego (took running one over with a car to break the damn thing). My personal favorite for toys that actually worked, was the 'Erector' set. I had an old old one my father had played with when he was a teenager, and a newer 80's version with a better case. All metal parts, bolts, strings and pulleys to make whatever my imagination could come up with. My only problem was, they didn't have flixible parts. It was all metal and hard plastic. I would have loved a combination of those and the lego technics!
The worst thing about censorship is ***END TRANSMISSION***
No, but what is wrong is the fetishistic notion that privatisation good per se. We are just emerging from the damage inflicted by ideologists who believed the mere fact of private ownership to be a social good.
When you have private ownership in the context of competition, consumers can vote with their wallets if the goods and services they are receiving are not up to expectation. When you have government in the context of democracy, citizens can simply vote if the ruling party fails to deliver. By placing public goods which form natural monopolies, into private hands, consumers have been put in the position of citizens in states where they have no vote. Here in Australia many of the privatisations carried out (by both sides of politics!) have accomplished both these economic and policial ills.
After centuries of struggle against absolutist government (which some might want to date back to 1215, or more realistically 1649), not only had the common law world established democracy, but by the early 1980s (at least in Australia) an effective body of Administrative Law, by which citizens could challenge the previously inviolable decisions of state bureaucracies. No sooner had this been accomplished, but governments started to 'outsource' (an 80s abomination meaning to contract out) bureaucratic functions, putting the decisions once again beyond the challenge of ordinary citizens, as they are beyond the choice of ordinary consumers.
Quite apart from resurgent neo-fascist parties, what we've been left with is poor service (eg . compare the Post Office with hopeless Post Shops of today), queues, higher prices, queues, inefficiency and queues. Did I mention fees to join queues? To think that we used to laugh at the Soviet Union because they had to queue for everything, and that the ideologists assured us this was from a want of market mechanisms! It's enough to make one change one's sig!!
I guess girlfriends would rather buy sweaters than toys for they husbonds for Xmas
If your girlfriend has a husband, I think you have bigger problems than not getting Legos for Xmas.
The justification usually given for privatising public services is that they can be made more efficient if private companies compete for contracts. Sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it doesn't work for national infrastructure, because there's no room for competition. National rail and utility networks have to be national. So when you privatise them you have to decide (1) who's going to own the existing network and (2) who's going to stop the new owners from breaking it up or running it into the ground. The usual response to (1) is to create a national infrastructure company (eg Railtrack) and grant it a monopoly. The solution to (2) is to create a regulatory body to supervise the infrastructure company.
At this point you may notice that what we have created is not very different from what we had before (except that there are lots of ministers with lots of shares in the infrastructure company, and none of the assets paid for by the public belong to the public any more). We have a national monopoly controlled by a government department. Where are the benefits of competition going to come from if companies can't compete to run the infrastructure?
The answer is service providers - companies that operate services (train journeys, telephone calls, water) over national infrastructure (tracks, cables, pipes). But they can't compete in the sense of choosing a can of Coke over a can of Pepsi - you can't choose which water provider to use every time you turn on the tap. You have to use the provider that 'operates' the pipes running to your house. Who chooses that provider? The regulator. 'Competition' occurs once every few years when the service contracts come up for renewal; service providers which have performed so badly that they have been fined to the brink of bankruptcy by the regulator might lose their contracts. Note that the service providers are not competing with one another on a day-to-day basis. They are only competing against standards set by a government department. It is only when a company fails to meet those standards for several years running that competition between companies occurs.
For example, I get to work on a train operated by Thameslink. Thameslink has a monopoly on my local line, so I have no choice about which service provider I use. No matter how much Thameslink pisses me off, I'm not going to switch to the competition because the competition doesn't run trains in my area. The only way I can get an improved service is if Thameslink performs so badly that the government takes away its contract. This is not free market competition, it's a command economy. It combines all the bloat and sluggishness of a command economy (the rail regulator is, after all, a government department) with the disadvantages of the private sector (accountability to shareholders rather than customers, long-term investment sacrificed for short-term profit).
Why on earth was this horrible public/private chimera created? Because corrupt ministers realised they were sitting on billions of pounds worth of saleable goods, and there was public support from people like you for the idea of privatisation even in situations where the principles of the market economy cannot be applied.
--
- junkyards. The metal junkyard on our farm was a source of inspiration for me. Most of the time you couldn't tell what a piece of junk came from, trying to figure that out stretched the brain. Of course the pieces themselves would then be assembled into giant robots. Just make sure your kid is up to date on his tetanus shots...
- unconnected computers. (not even to a BBS) Since you can't download games or surf the web, and you can't afford to buy them, you have to make your own, or else try to crack the games you've borrowed for friends.
Bryan
The problem comes when you don't have sufficient guards against abuse. That essentially means a regulatory body with the power to act in the best interests of the consumer.
Even with the power to do so, the regulatory body still must actually do something about, and many times they aren't willing to do that. Take for example the auto inspection fiasco in New Jersey. Former Governor Whittman (now head of the federal EPA), in all her infinate wisdom, decided to privatize the auto inspection system. This coincided with new federal regulations requiring more advanced tests (including driving the car at high speeds on a dynanometer). A company called Parsons Infrastructure, who have taken over privatized government functions for other states in the past, was selected to replace Motor Vehicles for inspections. Parsons promiced to provide the new system at an unrealisticlly low price which the Divison of Motor Vehciles claimed was not at all possible. But, Whittman continued forward with the plan.
Parsons never met any deadline that they agreed to. The state should have fined them as per their contract, but instead, the state kept giving them more money to complete the project. Time and time again, the state kept saying "Now, make sure you don't do that again! And here's more money for you." instead of really doing anything about it. When the system was finally in place, they produced another disaster. The new test was about three times as long as the old one and the equipment continuously broke down, resulting in 5 hour long waits to inspect your car. Only now, about two years after the new inspection system was put into place are they finally beginning to get it right. However, now the EPA says that we don't need to have this new test after all.
My conclusion? Burocracy is bad. Privitization is even worse.
So a good toy substitutes good education? If you have poor engineers, maybe you should take a look at your educationsystem.
When I started buying Legos for my kids, I was dismayed to find that you couldn't buy just plain blocks from Lego anymore, like when I was a kid in the 60s. No doubt, this is due to the expiration of the patents on the blocks.
But you can get large quantities of the plain blocks from the knockoff companies. We bought a large number of plain blocks from one of the knockoff companies. Plus, of course, my son has dozens of the various Lego-branded project kits that he's gotten on birthdays and XMAS.
You know what? My son (now 7) puts the Lego projects together exactly once, in record time. Then he rips them apart and tosses the pieces into the box of all other Lego parts. Then he builds fabulously complicated things out of the collection of parts that he has. The stuff he dreams up and builds is way beyond what I was building with just the plain parts. He's got all kinds of new pieces to choose from and the possibilities are far greater than ever before.
I think the situation with Lego is way better now than it ever was. There is no dumbing down of Lego that I can see. Just dumb kids and parents that can't see the possibilities. Mostly, its probably compulsive parents that urge their kids not to destroy or alter the intended project in any way. They want little Johnnies bedroom neat and tidy with the Lego projects showcased up on some shelf. This is not Legos problem, this is the anal compulsive behavior forced on middle-age society by the likes of Mr. Clean and Mr. Hoover, and TV shows like My Three Sons and Family Affair.
The damage was done to the parents of today's kids back in the 60s and 70s.
Luckily, I was smoking so much pot back then that the brainwashing did not take. I view the array of Lego parts littering my sons bedroom floor for what it is: the remains of a successful battle between his engineering skills and the creative visions of his mind.
It seems that some of the points he makes could be applied towards programming as well. Lego is about putting components together using common interfaces, the Visual Basic way. Erector set is more about making those interfaces in the first place, the assembly way.
Have we reached a point in software development where instead of innovating genuinely new software, we just put together libraries other people have written and consider ourselves 'building on the shoulder of giants'?
Workers, throw down your common libaries, your DLLs, your open source! Innovate the way it was meant to happen, in PUTs and POPs! As your key to the revolution, please see the included copy of MASM. May the cpu tick be with you.
It seems more likely to me that the falling popularity of toys like Meccano is a symptom of the generally low status of the engineering profession in the UK - indeed, the UK must be about the only western European country where "the professions" is commonly understood to refer only to the lawyer/ docter/ bank manager/ teacher class of white-collar activities, and most certainly not to anything as dull and dirty as engineering.
I would mod this up (I am currently enjoying mod status) but, I have a child, so therefore I am stupid - too stupid to work out this moderation stuff. Where am I anyway?
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Moderator's essentials
I totally agree. I've noted that years ago too, when I saw the new Lego boxes and their weird, unnecessary inflexible parts. I like your parallel with Windows/Linux, describing how Lego got from Linux to Windows :-)
Integrated components, my ass!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Meccano/Erector set requires tools. Lego requires hands. That makes Lego much better suited for younger, less skilled audiences. And yes, I ha an erector set as a child. It was a royal pain to build anything out of, and I don't beleive I learned anything from it except how difficult it is to get the mechanical contraptions you can dream up to actually work.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Just one Q:
If you're seeing how things really work, why did you buy your son action figures?
Well, that would certainly be the wrong way to privatize. Here's how auto inspection works everywhere I've lived in the US: the DMV licenses private businesses to sell inspection services to vehicle owners. The DMV does not serve as an intermediary in these transactions. If you start an inspection station and it takes years to get operational, that's your problem. Nobody will pay you to fail to inspect vehicles.
Not with conventional Lego, true. But with Meccano? Seems to me you're overlooking the ability to bend flat steel members. Of course I recognize the disadvantages.
Reading is practically _in_ London.
I know you Londoners can't see beyond Watford, but how about remembering that there is life at the other end of the M4. If Accepting that UK transport policy is a poor joke everywhere, including London, you should how bad it gets North of Manchester. Tried to get to Ireland by ferry ? I can get to Belfast by going through Dublin (which is in a foreign country, for the benefit of non-locals) and then up by train more easily than I can get any sort of train to the Heysham ferry terminal (still in England). As for rail access to the other main ferry to NI, from Stranraer, then forget it from anywhere South of Glasgow. 6 hour quoted waits for a connection at a major city (Preston) on the "West Coast Main Line" ?
If Brief Encounter was to be filmed on this line again, then they could have raised kids before their next train arrived !
Try booking a train ticket from somewhere regional to one of the London airports. I can book a ticket from Waterloo to Charles de Gaulle airport, via Paris, but I can't get one from Bristol to Heathrow (actually they'll sell you one, but it isn't valid in the mornings !).
I had a Meccano set growing up, a number 6 set with several extras. The box must have weighed about 30 or 40 lb.
8-)
I probably had the most Meccano of any slashdotter. We lived in Liverpool, and my Dad's haulage company used to haul scrap metal away from Binns Road. I didn't have much that was correctly painted, but I had an awful lot of sheer weight of it !
Some of it was red & green tartan too !
(I know nothing about NZ electricity).
The key phrase here appears to be "competition". I live in the UK, and I hate the legacy of Thatcher. Maybe it's all working wonderfully for you guys down under, but we're screwed.
How do you introduce competition in a railway system ? All we've seen are the train companies fighting to get out of each other's way and not compete on any services, a complete failure of the centralised group that maintains the fixed lines, failure of any through timetable, booking, or even ticket issuing services (don't expect to go in one side of London and out the other without queueing at least 3 times). Worst of all, we're now footing the bill for the directors of Railtrack to vote themselves massive pay increases when they've put up a poorer performance at management than the millienium dome.
Maybe privatisation with competition works (good luck to you if it does). The lessons of the UK though are that privatisation with fake competition is a failure, and that privatisation loses what little accountability there was in the first place.
When I was a lad (a not so mere 30 years ago) Lego came in lots of little pieces and we made the same complaint about this "new fangled" stuff just appearing. There were windows that looked like windows, not square bricks ! I think it's an old "nostalgia isn't what it used to be" rant, and it's bogus.
Now my own son (6) plays with his Lego, and my old stuff. He just doesn't care what shape the bricks are; a roof tile makes just as good a piece of pizza as it does a computer console.
At his age, Lego isn't interesting as a construction toy. It's more about simple abstract constructs that are given meaning by their play context (if he says yesterday's castle tower is now a bus, then it's a bus). By the time he starts to think about it as an engineering problem solving tool (How do I find a thing that can reach sideways and have a hook on the end ?) he'll hopefully be too interested in using it to do the job, not worrying about the provenance of whether it's OK to make Giant Killer Roberts out of pink Belleville pieces.
I Got it about 1980-1981 as well...
:)
Us oldies...
Anyway, I see there are several sets one can buy... there are some specialised sets which force you to build specific models etc, but I had the 1000 set... with many more pieces... and I can never remember having trouble building my own designs...
Depends on the set, I guess.
;)
I have looked...
I cannot find it many places... I bet it is fetching huge amounts on e-bay though...
PS: Some companies do still seem to be selling it.
Check out: Capsela
.. at least for kids.
I remember my first Meccano set... I lost a lot of little bits, and the rest rusted or broke.
The problem with LEGO is that it's overpriced for bits of inert plastic, but otherwise it's cool, but not *that* cool.
Capsela on the other had was cheap (at the time), and it was motorised. It also did not rust, and NEVER broke.
I wish I could buy some again, but have not seen it in local stores for some time now...
Maybe it is only for the sake of parents, which now are less embarassed when kids ask them to build something with the Lego box they have just received as gift.
Ciao
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FB
You've got a fair point here - perhaps the original post should've made some sort of point about monopolies. Cases in point - BT is now in competition with several companies (since I switched to Cable and Wireless I've had much lower bills and better service) and is going down the pan as a result. But Railtrack are the only ones who get control of the railways and allow carriers to run on them, so they can do what they like and they have passengers over a barrel because there's no alternative (which is why they can ask the government for millions of pounds subsidies one week, and give a huge payout to their shareholders or executives the next week).
Lego is still a contruction toy that encourages kids to be inventive and use their imaginations - it provides more of an engineering experience than Action Man or Playstation or something, and has clearly been a major toy in the childhood of a lot of /.ers.
We should encourage any toy that stimulates kids, not just the most complicated ones.
I also suspect that there may be a patriotic side to this too (Meccanno is British like Sir Kroto, Lego is Danish), though of course that's just my unfounded speculation.
And Railtrack keep going to the government asking for more money (they're supposed to be a private company remember, not a nationalised service), and all they seem to do with the cash is come up with more reasons why they need more cash. BR wasn't great, but Railtrack are really poor (as is demonstrated by the terrible number of deaths and accidents over the past couple of years).
Saying that giving more kids Meccano would solve this is totally unfounded. Whilst I respect Harry Kroto (he discovered Buckminster Fullerenes), and think that kids should be exposed to more engineering toys, I think that he's way off the mark with his comment.
Let us bring in the ideas by a man who has actually done some thing with legos. Eric Harshbarger. He has created the lego desk.I don't remember to many erector set desks. Eric has also managed to create many other wonderfully engineered pieces. I am sorry this gentleman feels he can blame the demise of British engineering on the lack of proper toys for kids. Besides I was always a Tinker toy person myself.
This was a serious proposal, back when staying ahead of the USSR technically was a major goal of American education. Bell Labs used to send out free electronics kits to students.
I had "From Sun to Sound", with a solar cell, speaker, and transistor. You had to build your own capacitor from foil and waxed paper, and they didn't tell you the dimensions; you had to calculate them.
With that in mind, were I a parent, I wouldn't run out and buy a Meccano set just because 'Legos are ruining your child's engineering potential', before you consider the fact that when left in a box in the basement for a few months, these things rust. In comparison, old legos just accumulate dust.
I also recall getting really sick and tired of turning that screw driver.
Besides, where are the Meccano mindstorms?
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Uh, my boyz (4 and 5 years olde) have:
- Lotso ThomasTheTankEngine Stuff
- The plastic beginners erector stuff
- All 3 sizes of Lego plus the sound-module jet thing
- No computers or gameboy's or anything (there isn't one in the house)
Why not have both?
I'm a developer and manager with 20+ years experience, not a luddite by any means. But I'm convinced that, at least for the next couple of years, these types of toys are better than a peecee with even the best educational software.
Just think - most folks spend $1,000 on a peecee. If I spent that much on an erector set, my boyz would put Pinky and the Brain out of business!
WTF? As a college chemistry professor, I would say that neither toy is good. Let us build with some sort of tetrahedral shape and then we should debate the usefulness. Buy an Oxford molecular model kit and go to town.
This is just the natural order of being a crumpy old fart. You'll get your chance, from the sounds of it.
:wq
No actually, thanks for saying it. I've been wondering for 20 (or is it 30?) years whether there's any tangibility to this commodity for which I have been personally responsible. In those more transcendental moments I fear that it is all nothing and that makes me fear for poor Bill Gates.
:wq
don't expect to go in one side of London and out the other without queueing at least 3 times
Most of what you say makes sense, but this one bit is bulls**t. I recently bought a return ticket from Reading to Manningtree, which are towns on almost exaclty opposite sides of London on railway services owned by two different companies, so I queued once to go into London and out twice (once in each direction). The trains were late and overcrowded and the ticket was overpriced, but that's another story.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Reading is further away from London than Watford, and Manningtree is right out in the sticks. The train journey involves three different transport companies and qualifies as going across London, which is enough to refute the point about having to buy three tickets.
I have also come across the bizarre problem of buying a rail ticket from Reading to Heathrow (not possible), but you can buy a rail ticket from Reading to the Heathrow underground station (the journey takes three hours).
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Some of the modern Lego kits have 50 unique Lego pieces, only found in one kit, and only suitable for making one specific model. The result is one extremely realistic model, but where was the fun in building it?
Probably just as fun as making a model airplane or tank, which comes in 50 - 10000 unique pieces suitable for making only one model. And can only be (heaven forbid!) put together once.
Lemure, wtf! Don't you mean Lemur?
Came to this thread late, but not everyone writes for karma. Mod this up, not for me, but for my Dad. My Dad, now dead, bought me a Meccano set when I was six. [I am likely twice as old as the average Slashodot reader, oh sod it, born 1956.] Sometimes I hated him for it, because he bought it for himself as much as me, big kid, and always I love him because otherwise I'd be stuck in some dead-end factory job up north p*ss*ng my time away on beer and betting but I'm not, because Meccano made me think, and thinking got me a career as a research scientist.
I had relatives who built armour out of Meccano and beat sh*t out of each other. I built a traction engine that could pull my weight, which will never happen with Lego. My dad built a grandfather clock, and due to the expense of building the counterweight from Meccano, instead melted lead on my mother's cooker in one of her saucepans and poured it into a baked bean can.
Thanks Dad.
"New Zealand has a privatised electricity production industry"
hahaha, and which Pacific city's central business district was without power for nearly a month not too long ago?
Guess the marketing guys didn't factor in the Slashdot Psyche ;)
Well, 'forgot' isn't quite the right way to express this.
More accurately, the Thatcher government had a vast cash-flow problem, and rather than do the honest thing and offer the public a choice between massive cuts in public services or a significant rise in income taxes (though they DID double VAT), decided to raise a bunch of cash by, as Harold MacMillan put it, 'selling off the family silver'. The public infrastructure, that I and my parents had paid for with our taxes was embezzled away from us to pay for tax cuts for tory voters. The buyers got the public utilities at a knock-down price (the whole privatisation programme only raised £300 Billion, a pathetically low price for the infrastructure of a G7 economy), and the govt were only able to sell even at that reduced price by making absolutely sure that the companies would be profitable.
And the way this was achieved was by giving them token regulation with all the power of a week-dead halibut on mogadon.
i don't actually blame the operators for the state of the utilities. They're plc's, so legally speaking they DO have a duty to their shareholders, and DON'T have any duty towards their customers. But I do have some very serious objections to both the principle, and the implementation that we got in terms of regulation.
TomV
A large number of us bought a tiny fraction of the equity, while the big City investors bought the lion's share. They mainly got away with it due to a combination of '80's cocaine hype and a 180-seat majority in the House of Commons based on a 40% share of the vote. They mainly got away with it because they never asked, they just did it and their lobby-fodder let them.
Doesn't matter which party, a majority like that is just too much temptation for whichever politician holds 'the royal prerogative'
TomV
Yup. I certainly do. And I wouldn't deny it for a second. A lot of what that evil h3ll-b!tch did desperately needed doing, but I come from the 'end can't justify the means' camp, so i tend to feel that putting 3 million people out of work to create a pool of potential blacklegs so the Tories could punish the miners for 1974 was a pretty appalling move.
And as you say, the idea that an economy could run entirely on service industries was nonsense, and she knew it. And it was three months wait to have a new phone line that didn't work most of the time even if Hughie and the boys didn't have their tanks on the lawn that week. And which model of handset would you like? Oh yes, the only one available, which you didn't own, you had to lease. In cream or black. Magic.
And rolling blackouts of course. I remember always having to have candles in the house because we only had mains electricity about 4 days a week.
But how can you diss the immortal Allegro Vanden Plas, a truly groundbreaking adventure in, er, foulness?
Oh I feel old now...
TomV
>> Right on. After all, it's not like New Zealand:
>> * was the first country to give women the vote
[...snip...]
> They all left New Zealand.
No, actually, there's still quite a few women here...
Lego is brilliant and I love it, but it's a no-brainer. Meccano is vastly superior as a piece of engineering, but they are for different purposes. I used some strips of my daughter's Meccano last month to hold the dishwasher dial and doorclip together temporarily when the faceplate got cracked (incidentally revealing some truly dickhead "design" from the DW makers :-) I used some bits of her Lego shortly before to make a stand for
an antique SCSI Syquest drive to stack it on top
of a rather narrow-bodied UPS while reorganising
one corner of the study.
Both are excellent, but for serious engineering skills, Meccano is just streets ahead.
Dunno where this came from, but I know at least one person had something similar for their Slashdot .sig. I do not recall seeing it in the last few months though...
-- Judas96
"...don't take a nerf bat to a knife fight." - Joe Rogan, said on News Radio
I've had both. The truth is that Erector sets are a great idea, but at the end of the day you feel more like a mechanic than an artist when you're done with an Erector piece. Also, keep in mind that Erector/Meccano seems to be primarily an engineering thing, whereas probably a majority of Lego geeks probably go in more for architecture than mechanics. They really do occupy separate (though overlapping) problem spaces -- and a Lego castle just looks better, dammit :-)
What I was always a fan of was Pipeworks. You can get Quadro now, which is essentially the same thign -- I used to build gokarts with them and race them down driveways.
/Brian
/Brian
New Zealand's electricity production is a bad example. On February 20, 1998, there was a major power outage in Aukland. The reason? Due to the privatization of electricity, the power company had cut back on the maintenance of the power grid to save money, causing a failure. For more info, read the story at the Earth Island Institute.
I always turned their heads around, so you had a blank yellow visor on the space helmet. It turned them from cheery little spacement into my faceless minions of doom.
From the Zometools web page:
YOU CAN MAKE...
Squares
Cubes
Triangles
Pyramids
Regular Polygons
And many more!
*yawn*
Placing a fully suited Lego Spaceman in the Toaster Oven (the microwave didn't work, of course) and melting him ever so slightly.
Result: A surface-pitted Lego figure hideously deformed, yet smiling resolutely despite his fate! I was the loser in that round...
Then I discovered that a certain gauge of drill bit corresponded exactly to the spears that the castle-set Lego-men carried...
[pink beam of light]
New Zealand has nothing to teach the world, other than that there are worse places to come from than Australia.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
They all left New Zealand.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I had an erector set. It had sharp edges, a million little pieces, and I could never think of anything interesting to do with it.
I got my start programming with
- Think-A-Dot
- DigiComp I
Think-A-Dot was a plastic box with 8 flip-flops inside. You dropped marbles in the top to toggle them.DigiComp I was a 3-bit state machine, implemented in plastic. I spent hours programming it when I was 9 or 10.
They do that to keep the cost down.
Each big (hollow) custom piece replaces anywhere from 10 to 100 individual bricks in a Lego kit. This enables them to sell the kit at an affordable price.
Only if you make it so.
In Canada we managed to privatise the Air Traffic Control service without any immediate loss of safety or drop in productivity. The key was to create the commercial entity from scratch (as opposed to selling to the highest bidder) and issue the new company a set of marching orders that ensure the public interest. It was instituted as a "non-share-capital corporation" which means there is no profit motive as the only source of capital is the bank. No dividends are required as there's nobody to collect them. Furthermore, their charter *forbids* them from making a profit. They are required to set their fees strictly on the basis of expenses. Any operating surplus is returned to the airlines as fee rebates. There have been labour problems along the way, but that's to be expected of a new company with an old workforce. Eventually the internal conflicts will settle.
As a result of privatization, the Canadian system has become among the least expensive ATC service in the world while increasing the traffic-handling capability accross the board. The new directors were able to break the bonds of government procurement and we had a complete technology revolution in less than 4 years.
Britain and the USA are right to fear "privatization" of such services in the usual sense. Had we been sold to a MegaCorp things would have been radically different.
% Bart checks the decrepit old Spirograph[tm] factory. A lone man plays
% with a Spirograph on a slanted desk.
Bart: Yo, Dr. S: have you seen Milhouse today?
Dr. S: No.
Bart: OK, thanks. [starts to leave]
Dr. S: Wait: did you know that there's a direct correlation between the
decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about
it.
Bart: I will.
Dr. S: No you won't.
--
Bart visits the Spirograph factory, "Radioactive Man"
--
Correlation does not imply Causation.
So what if an experienced hacker's comments are more insightful and relevant, my postings are certified.
don't forget about Capsella, tinkertoys, and of course that damn log house building set... e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
I remember being fairly young at the time (maybe 6-8 somewhere, certainly before 9 when I got a ZX81 ;-) ) when I got a cardboard box full of old Army Meccano from an older cousin. It was like normal Meccano but with green instead of yellow panels, plus a few premade truck cabs and some HUGE wheels. It certainly took my attention away from lego to the point where I went out into the back garden and build a big sturdy wooden box with magnetic hinged lid for it.
;-)
Parents looked half scared to death seeing me out there with large lengths of wood and power tools at that age
Both have their definite merits, but I always found Meccano had an old fashioned bare components feel to it that clicked with me, and I liked building trucks that were almost indestructable (watch what happens when you give your lego car a really good push and it goes off course into a door frame...).
--
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
OK: I issue a recall for any %-:')
You make a very valid point though, as long there is an alternative (better multiple alternatives) on the consumer front, the privatization of infrastructure might work.
Sure privatization of the telecom market definitely brought lower prices, better service (except with the former gubynmynt carrier, which is rotten as ever) and a virtually free state of the art cell phone every year (OK, you pay one way or another for that).
The real problem there seems to be the unbundling of the local loop, for which the former telephone-nazis charge uncompetitive and monopolistic inter-connection fees. And, thankfully the entire global phone system works pretty well, because it's not up to private companies to define the standards.
(OT:) Actually the global phone system is an enbelievably successful example for the client/server paradigm. No matter which client handset you use, you can connect your client with any other client throughout the world and that this works so reliabley is pretty fantastic in my book...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This might be the case, if an utility is not sole supplier.
The problem is, that a profit oriented business tends to socialise costs and privatise profits. This works awfully bad for you, the customer if you only have one source for water, transportation or electricity, etc...
I agree that it might work better, when regulating bodies get more power beyond a mere slap on the wrist, which a lot of those scumbags anyway factor into their balance sheets.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Parents: Why do you listen to this beatles shit, this is just noise and has no value, yadayadayada
The irony of course is that nowadays:
Me: How can you listen to this techno stuff, it's just noise and has no value, yadayadayada
Er! well, never mind...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I take it the gentleman refers to the trainsystem in ol' Blighty and I agree that it doesn't really work well; however I don't really link that to the rising popularity of Lego and the decline of Meccano, but more to the following factors:
Miss Thatchers unprecedented privatisation blizzard, which essentially wrecked all British utilities, by guaranteeing end user prices beyond believe without the necessity to invest into maintenance.
I don't think it's really efficient to split a national train system into umpteen private companies, each one of them considering stockholder profit far more important then customer satisfaction, clean trains or even security. The safety record of the British rail system is probably the worst in Europe, which brings us to another issue:
Railtrack, the infamous privatized infrastructure company, with an abyssimal track record for just about everything. Now, please repeat loud and clear: If any infrastructure of national importance is outsourced to a private entity you're fucked! The moment this happens profits are more important then the public...
You see, the UK is living proove for this fact: Watersupply, train system, electricity is about the most expensive in Europe, but provides the most rotten service to their customers. Just ask a fireman about what they did to the water pressure in order to avoid fines for water leaked through the rotten pipe system and no! the fire brigades don't consider this to be funny.
So sir, the demise of the British rail system is not due to Lego or Meccano, but due to greed, buddy favors and quite likely corrupt politicians.
No need to thank me...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
No, no, no! We need more K'Nex!
...a roof tile makes just as good a piece of pizza as it does a computer console...
heh heh, that's funny, and makes a good point.
This almost implies that everyone who complains "LEGO has too many custom shapes and doesn't allow for creativity" are really just guilty of not being creative themselves.
---
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I think the original quote for that was from Kristian Wilson of Nintendo in 1989:
===
Personally, I used every building toy I could get my hands on when I was growing up. They all required thinking about building in different ways and all were better suited to different projects. I used Capsela, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Robotix, Erector Set, Lego, plain wood blocks. I found a site that sells em all (and has pictures of them) called constructiontoys.com.
I also agree with others here who dislike the customization of pieces in sets like lego, etc. Building something interesting used to require more imagination, rather than getting the custom alien space ship kit. Plus, making boats that float out of the red roof lego pieces was fun in and of itself.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
A graph plotting Meccano's disappearance from children's toy boxes would, he claimed, match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Britain's young engineers and scientists.
I conjecture that a graph plotting the decline in the use of asbestos insulation in schools would match the alleged fall in the quantity and quality of Rolling Stones albums. I plan to draw a very powerful conclusion from this. Of course, I don't have a Nobel Prize in Chemsitry, so what do I know?
As I understand it, the problems with British railways have a lot less to do with engineering than with finance and administration. Maybe all those kids who grew/are growing up on Railway Tycoon will be better equipped to realize that half-assed privatization is not a good idea.
-
-
Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
Marvin Minsky wrote (in an introduction to a book about Logo in 1984) about why Meccano and Tinker Toys are better than Lego bricks. His argument is based upon the fact that Lego limits the combinatorics in ways the others don't. You want a few kinds of parts that can be combined in lots of interesting ways. Minsky relates this to programming language design. Pretty interesting article.
When I was a lad(about the same time period as you) all I had were a few Lego sets from McDonalds Happy Meals. I had a couple of the helicoper sets and a car. These had about ten to twelve pieces each, with three to four of them being specialized pieces. Everything from a full-body chassis for a car to a 2X2 block with eyes on the side and a propellor piece. I took these pieces and built a robot on a skateboard with a beenie propellor hat. The chassis of the car was the skateboard and the eyes of robot were the blocks which had eyes on them. I won a contest with that little bot. I was up against people who had built huge spaceports, but they had followed directions and made minor modifications to existing designs. My design was completely original and strikingly different from the original designs those pieces were part of the sets for. That win sparked my love of Lego and I now have thousands of pieces, including several Mindstorms sets. Lego engineers are really engineers, and creativity, be it with special-purpose pieces, or with general-purpose pieces, is really king. I've taken the heads of R2-D2 that came with my droid developer kit and turned them into a beachball. And I've never seen a more specialized piece than that.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
With regards to the Linux portion of your statement, it might be accurate to compare it to a box of legos, with some pieces missing, and the directions are all wrong! :)
From the linked Meccano page:
:)
"MECCANO® is the registered trademark of Meccano SA, Calais, France."
Not that I actually know where its from or anything, but did anyone else see the irony in this?
The problem of the trains running on time isn't for a lack of quality building toys. It's a problem of Engeneering majors going into computers instead of building actual things when they get out of college.
I'm going to get flamed for saying software isn't an actual thing aren't I?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Yes
The issue is not one of which is better, Lego or Meccano, nor is an issue of the dumbing down of lego etc...
The Issue is why aren't children becomming engineers, I can tell you why, there is no incentive anymore. I started my Uni days as an engineer, but when I went through school everyone was talking about the new "IT" field and how everyone should get into this booming area. IT has taken a lot of the people who would have fallen into science and engineering. It's no the fault of IT, but no-one (and I mean no-one at all) is promoting engineering anymore. and even those who do go into engineering (like myself) find that it is not what it is cracked up to be, I left engineering because it didn't offer me the choices I want. I went into IT because it did.
Both Lego and Meccano featured heavily in my childhood and they both gave me an understanding of physics and the real world. That, I guess, drove me towards Engineering in the first place. But I was much more into Lego, still am, This claim is just stupid and anyone who puts hold by it really is an idiot. Wood, Wooden blocks, Straws, spagetti, twigs, clay. I have built structures and objects out of all of these. It is not the medium but the outlet. Less and less people are putting their outlet into engineering. Why? Well that is the issue really.
Trav
Leg Godt!
I highly agree that children who build thier own toys from such things as Lego's and Erector Sets grow up to be VERY creative and VERY intellectual.
I don't agree with however, the way he points the blame at Lego, like said In an earlier post, maybe if they played Railroad Tycoon they would have realized that half-assed designs just don't cut it when it comes to that.
"He Who Laughs Last, Is Just A Hand In The Bush" - Ozzy Osbourne
This points to a deeper fact of life: the older you are, the more everyone and everything else sucks.
The decline of civilization is not the fault of toys. It is the fault of parents and others who influence our lives.
It used to be parents taught their children to work hard and be responsible. Now children are left to do whatever they want to. There is nothing wrong with fun, but childhood is for preparing for adult hood (ie maturing, learning, etc.).
I am thankful for my dad who took the time to teach me. When I asked for more legos (yes, I had a few), he taught me to weld instead. Not only did he teach me to think analytically and design, he also taught me a work ethic and morals.
I remember hardly ever making the toy on the front of the box, more often then not I'd build little model space craft, ships, or airplanes from the pieces. The utility of the pieces in the past allowed your creativity to go with very few bounds but now days you're almost forced into making the toy on the box. The utility of the lego pieces is what made them great and i hope they go back to that by the time i have kids.
that sounds like PG&E. (bunch 'o bastards imo)
PG&E decided to state that they needed money from the state to stay in business. yet try to blame everyone else under the sun for their inability to manage their business.
looks like the real problem for the PG&E power fiasco is the lack of kids playing with RC toys. if more kids played with RC toys - they wopuld better understand how to manage their power requirements - and society wouldnt have put PG&E in the position they are in.
Perhaps some of the popularity of LEGO over the erector set can be attributed to how well one can build a catapult in each. When I built a torsion catapult out of LEGO technic pieces (and some twine), I was quite successful. One of the axles did get twisted beyond repair, but that thing could throw a minifig 20 feet. On the other hand, when I tried to build a trebuchet from an erector set, it was only successful in bending some of the girders. That wasn't fun at all.
GOTO
I think part of the problem is that Lego, generally, is a toy where the joy is based more on imagination and creativity. Sure, you might have to do some tricky block stacking in order to get the form you want, and I guess there's a few hingy blocks, but that's about the limit. Erector sets (or whatever you call them) you have to make work. There's a higher degree of complexity than snaping blocks together.
Given a choice, I think most people would rather rely on imagination and creativity for their enjoyment than having to make something work.
Hey, I _like_ engineering, and I'm still one of those people sometimes.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I disagree, at least in part. Sure, a lot of the Lego kits have those special large pieces that are practically useless with other Lego projects (the Droid Development Kit comes to mind), but a lot of them aren't. Most of the pieces in the main set of Lego Mindstorms are the small ulitarian pieces, same with most of the parts in Robosports. Extreme Creatures, IMAO, is a waste of cash because it doesn't follow that, but on the other hand, Vision Command is excellent for what it is supposed to do.
Although I heartily reccommend that anyone who wants to build things in Mindstorms should go out and buy a half-dozen or so basic Lego sets just to get more pieces. They don't provide nearly enough of the pieces you'll need for some things. And I'm still looking for some more (and larger) tank tread-style pieces.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Hrm... wierd... when I was growing up, I played with my dad's old Erector Set, which had gears, an electric engine, pulleys, all kinds of fun things. When the engine finally gave out, I went and bought one of the new boxes of Erector set parts. No engine, no pulleys, no real fun at all. Flashy diagrams of models that look vaguely like the things they're supposed to be (none of the plane models were even vaguely aerodynamic, more like boxes with wings), and no real fun at all.
Fast forward several years to Lego Technics and Mindstorms. These are much more fun then any of the Erector sets I played with when I was a child except for my dad's old set. The programming for the Mindstorms is kludgy and annoying, but the possible things you can build are much more open, especially with some of the parts available. (I heartily reccommend not getting Extreme Creatures though... waste of cash.)
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Kind of hard to get enjoyment out of a having a faction of nuts rampaging through a colony of bolts.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Fastech was also pretty cool, I guess it was sort of like a cheap all-plastic version of an erector set, but instead of screws or anything, it had this plastic rivet-type connection system, with its own rivet-tool dealy. You could build a lot of stuff with that.
----
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
is a janitor. Nobody uses engineer in the States unless they want to sound important or they work in a trainyard. Scientist is the new profession...
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
First year we take two or three CS classes, Program Architecture, Data Structures and Logical Foundations of Programming. The first two are indeed taught in java, but the books we use are written in house by a guy who I have deemed the Bill Nye of Computer Science. As far as the programming goes, he despises the idea of learning to program in java the way in which you spoke of, plugging together components to make them work. The first class does however do this to some degree, mostly in the GUI sections. Its basically an intro to CS class that discusses your foundational concepts of if-thens, while loops, and functions/methods (what a god awful term, methods). The second class, which he teaches, has absouletly no dependance on Sun's Java APIs. It would make no sense to teach a class about HashTables by making them import java.util and creating an instance of HashTable. I agree that aint programming. In fact, Mr. Schmidt has made an effort to try and keep the ideology as language independant as he can, given that all our assignments are java based. The Logical Foundations class is a really interesting class with little work, but its important indeed.
The over all structure of our cirriculum is a 4 year program by evility. Every semseter we take at least one CS class. Each class is the prerequisite for the next, and they're only offered one semester a year for the most part. So I come in with 32 credit hours, enough to cut a year out of the way, but I have to stay for 4 because those 32 are only general education credits not CS. In a way I suppose its good, but in another, I wish I could compact it more.
As for the upper level classes, we're expected to pick up the required language after sophmore year. Its a good way of weeding out the weaker students, but its also a good way of killing enrollment. Of about 300 new freshmen, 200 took the Intro CS Class (CIS 200) and changed to MIS in the College of Business. My girlfriend freaked and changed to Computer Engineering, but she's more of a hardware head than I am anyways. My roommate was well versed (too well versed, in my opinion) in VB, and he faired ok, though hes developed an exquisite disdain for working in VB anymore. I really hope that experiencing more powerful languages won't leave a sour taste in the mouth for other langauges, because LISP is quite daunting.
So what University or Institute are you in?
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Open Source Sysadmin
On that other tidbit, I dont really think OOP was inspired by Lego so much as it was by natural progression. We had structs, and programs that worked with structs, so it was only a matter of time till we had structs that could work on themselves. OOP and the SmallTalk MVC architecture is really the result of people trying several BAD ways to implement things. Of course, I could be wrong.
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Open Source Sysadmin
that your strong suspicion is based on an incorrect hunch at best. Compilers must be written to handle any possible usage of any statement of a language, leading to a lot of redundancies simply so that it can conform to some rules that allow them to handle any possible usage of the higher level code.
For example, you'll often find that not all of the data registers are used for an arithmetic operation, because some have been reserved for things like pointer arithmetic, and subroutine route tracing. Also, a subroutine will often back up ALL registers to the stack, because it has no way of knowing which are important, and which are just storing garbage.
If you know for certain which registers are being used, and which are free, you are given a lot more leeway in writing your code. Need places for 6 ints so you can add them together? Load them into 6 unused registers and add away. Often compilers will do something even as simple as that using the stack and some RPN-like math.
Anyway, the point is, because you are writing specialized code that you know all the ins and outs of, you can cut corners that no compiler would be able to, and streamline your code to something truly magnificent.
That doesn't mean it's easy, though...
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I had both as a child, the original lego before moving on to Meccano, and back to lego technic. I would suggest the have complementary roles, Lego teaches Design, and Meccano teaches Engineering.
Yes! Think rave party :)
I also watched a Novell CNE spend 8 hours plugging in a Colorado Jumbo tape drive and installing the software for it. (For those of you that don't know, the Colorado Jumbo plugged into a floppy connector and had a very simple DOS based backup program. No other settings required.)
I also once had an MCSE ask me how to format a floppy. I have seen NT installs where they formatted the primary partition to 250 MB with a FAT file system, and then shard folders on that same partition. (Which means, since FAT has no security descriptors, there really wasn't a whole lot someone needed to do to be able to erase the shared information.)
I think I could get rich if I made bumper stickers that said, "I'm an Engineer!!!"
And you don't even want to hear what I have to say about the people that call themselves Audio and Video engineers these days....
When I was a kid I had loads of lego. I never build what it said on the package, but huge boats and plains - over 1 metre in length. That must have been developing to my imagination and technical skills.
"If you keep an open mind people will throw a lot of garbage in it."
As a Dane, critisism of Lego always touches a sensitive spot (you DO know that Lego is from Denmark, right? ;) but you are really on to something here.
:)
The blocks are bigger now than before. However, I saw an interview with a chief designer/engineer at Lego on Danish TV a year ago, and he said that this was a trend Lego got into in the 90's, and that they wanted to move away from it, as many of their customers were complaining about it..... so there's hope
BTW, a tidbit you might appreciate: A couple of years ago part of the LEGO Technic assortment was targeted in Danish newspapers towards adult men! A picture of 40 year old man in a suit toying around with a few pieces. I thought it was so cool, but I don't think it was a commercial success. I guess girlfriends would rather buy sweaters than toys for they husbonds for Xmas.
Oh yeah.... another tidbit.... LEGOs longterm vision: Programmable intelligent blocks - think OBJECTS! Very cool that LEGO, which AFAIK inspired OOP, now wants to take the idea back and use it to develop themselves.
-Kraft
-Kraft
Live and let live
Was there some sort of popularity battle between Lego and Meccano? I don't recall any such thing.
If I were to lay blame on anything, there has been some decrease in creativity these days. I hate to resort of the arguments of my parents and grandparents but they were right in thier observation that I had more fun with cardboard boxes than with any of the thousand 'action figures' that I cried for as a child.
My own sons seem to enjoy building their own toys as well. It's good to see that instinct hasn't died though they still seem to love their 'action figures' very much.
Now it is a chicken and egg situation on restoring a more broad interest in building and engineering toys. Our U.S. marketting engine is geared to 'get rich quick' ideals with short term and high yield product life-cycles.
Lego has an opportunity in this. They have inspired our children to build things with their bricks, but when they get too old for the bricks, there is nothing left for them to grow into. As it is, they simply find something else to play with... something that's not Lego.
There's not a lot of thought given to the philosphy of civic responsibility. It's just not as important as that bottom line. Accountants should be required to take courses in humanities in order to achieve their credentials. Perhaps then the world might become a bit more human. Companies like the original version of "Ford Motor Company" and the like who were as philanthropic as they were interested in marketing might again flourish. Wouldn't that be something? Wouldn't it though?
Maybe I'm not preaching to the right people, but when the right people aren't listening, you've just got to talk to the people who are listening. The message has a better chance of getting out and preading if you try than if you don't.
The older I get the more I see the way things really work. What are we doing to our children?
I believe the current trend of blatantly looking for the largest and dumbest man for husband has resulted in a decline of human intellect.
This is just academic interest --- I am neither against nor for this trend. (Hell, I would go for a dumb blonde anytime myself.)
Oh another thing - when you're done having fun, can you please go double-check if that kid of yours is really yours?
Lego has the better teaching aid.... computer control.
Yes, plains, big flat things. They are real easy in Lego. Planes however were for real boys, and Meccano.
Sorry, couldn't resist. %-)
Timberdoodle (or www.timberdoodle.com)
Timberdoodle Company is a homeschooling supply company that I think is one of FischerTechnik's sole USA distributors. I do know that they've said in the past that some of the sets that they sell are only avaliable in the USA from them.
I was first introduced to FischerTechnik in 4th(?) grade when my mom bought a few kits from them. Awesome stuff...I've kept my eye out for other places to buy them here in the USA, haven't seen any others so far.
I did play with my dads (circa 1930) Mecanno set and the quality was a lot higher. I'm not sure that this is an example of kids being dumbed down or products going through "cost optimization".
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
And they don't have engineer quality issues. Lego was also more popular in North America and continental Europe. Does that mean North American and European engineers are less qualified (NOTE: I'm not talking about quantity of engineers) than Meccano trained Britishers? My understanding of the history of engineering in England is it was ruthlessly mired in Victorian mechanical engineering (Meccano) and was unprepared for the electronics and materials revolution that swept the rest of the world.
If he wants to blame anybody for the decline in British Engineering, he needs only look at their "progressive" schools and the cultural inertia that hasn't allowed England's Engineering community to get beyond ironwork engineering. Lego teaches you concepts that work well in electronics and materials engineering, and with Lego Mindstorms, robotic programming. Meccano teaches you how to build steam engines in an age of mag-lev trains.
Notta Benne: Meccano has its place. In fact, I think an improved Meccano (with better quality parts, materials and tools) with the ability to connect to Lego would be a good addition to the world of toys.
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The only really cutting edge areas for mechanical engineering are manufacture of ICs and Formula One racing. Perhaps the ignorant fool has not noticed but the British Formula One industry is a multi-billion dollar concern. Also Ford may have closed the plant making the Ford Fiesta (budget hatchback) in Halewood, but they replaced it with the plant making the Jaguar X-Type.
I had a Meccano set growing up, a number 6 set with several extras. The box must have weighed about 30 or 40 lb. At the time the same set new would have cost several hundred pounds. Today it would probably cost over a thousand.
I also had lego and from an earlier age. Most kids can't start with lego until they are 9, they don't have the strength to do the bolts. You can start with the duplo lego at 3 and on the real stuff by 6.
When technical lego first came out it was very much a competitor for Meccano. As time has gone on though they seem to have dumbed it down. Most sets have at least one unique piece so that to build it you have to buy the set.
Unfortunately the comp-sci version of Meccano has yet to be written. When I grew up with the Commodore PET and the ZX-80 personal computers were pretty simple and well within the understanding of a 12 year old. Today the PC is beyond anyone's understanding.
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When I was younger, we didn't have any of those (modern gadget)s. We had the (old junk), that was good and lasted forever. Now, the kids can't even...
My Grandpa wasn't a nobelist, so he didn't make it to the news, but that's the only difference I can see.
That being said; I grew up with erector sets, not legos. (That dates me, eh?) I think the preference for these leads to a grasp of mechanics and physics, whereas legos is more modular, and more like solving puzzles. Each is a valuable teaching toy, and maybe giving your kids both would be the best idea.
By the way, I don't remember cutting myself on the erector set parts, but then I had so many scrapes, cuts, etal. that I wouldn't anyways. That's part of growing up, and prepares you for the hard knocks you get for the rest of your life.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
As a kid, I wasn't fortunate to have either a Lego or Meccano set but I loved playing with both when I visited friends or relatives who did. Back then, in the pre-Mindstorms days, Lego was made up of very basic building blocks - far less complex than it is today with very few custom parts.
Looking back, they were essentially two completely different toys.
Meccano/Erector Set was an open-ended mechanical construction set that taught (by trial and error, intuition and inspiration) the basic concepts of mechanical engineering. Lego, on the other hand, was more about shapes (and colours) working together. Basically, it analogous to architectural design than to anything mechanical.
Meccano/Erector set constructs did something. Lego constructs just looked good.Of course, this changed when Lego started to bring out its custom kits - engines, remote controls, etc essentially changed the nature of the game. But, more often than not, the kids who played with these by-the-numbers custom kits had little or no idea of the mechanical principles involved in making their latest creation go, whereas kids who messed around with Meccano/Erector Set were far more au fait with the science behind the scenes, even if they weren't conciously aware of their knowledge.
Bottom line: Meccano/Erector Set taught kids how to think mechanics far more than the Lego of that time ever did. It was a triumph of substance over style. However, Lego's increasing popularity and the dwindling attraction of Meccano/Erector Set had the inverse effect. Eventually, unfortunately, style did triumph over substance.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
How many weeks was it?
That sounds an awful lot like a bunch of the teenagers I know.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
Robotics isn't engineering? Gimme a break! Mindstorms is totally an engineering toy. I seem to recall they even use it at some engineering schools.
The Technic stuff has lots of the bits and my old Erector set had, plus more - motors, gears, pulleys, etc. You can totally understand how mechanical devices are put together, and build some pretty complex gizmos.
The only difference between Lego and Erector/Meccano is the bolts (which I always lost anyways.) Oh yeah, and Mecanno/Erector rusts and tends to slice open little kids fingers. This guy is just angry that his favorite childhood toy is unpopular.
I disagree. The shape of the bits is irrelavant. Lego is still cool. My four year old son loves Lego. When he gets a new set, we build the spaceship/robot/whatever and then, invariably, he gets bored of it, takes it apart and builds something completely different out of the bits. Its just as creative a process as when I was a kid. Big deal that he has a windshield for his car that actually *looks* like a windshield.
When I was a kid I had a choice between Meccano and Lego Technic. Lego won every time mainly because the time it took me to get something interesting made in Lego was about ¼ of the time for Meccano. Lego wins because is has the variety of components, most of which can be used in a number of different ways - take for example the standard Lego Girder: It can be joined to other bricks by the normal bricks and holes on the to & bottom. But you can also push the bumps into the holes on the side. You can also use the holes on the side to join the girder to other holes using the spring-loaded pegs or the rods. The best system of all was Fisher Technic - that was what we used in design & technology class at school. Fisher has all the best robotics & sensor kit years before Lego had it. The system of plastic blocks that could be re-enforced with metal rods was incredibly strong.
I also don't think much of modern LEGO. The sets I grew up with had hundreds of little pieces that could be used to make all sorts of things, but the modern sets have a few large pieces that can only really make one design. This is a pity. In fact, if you look at the really good LEGO models on the 'Net, they use lots of small pieces rather than a few big pieces.
they have Fischertechnik.
I've bought from them--they're nice to deal with. and if you're in Boston, you can drive out to Waltham to see the stuff in person.
J
OK, as an IT consultant and lego fan, I feel compelled to speak (type). I got into lego in 1976 and I'm now a hard-core collector, 300-400 sets. I've also run an online parts auction and bought and sold many sets on e-bay
In my opinion, lego has changed greatly over the years. Sets got more complicated, then a lot less complicated. But still, it's silly to go to the store and look at the shelves and only use that subset of available sets to develop an opinion as a whole. What's happened to town sets in the last few years is very sad. Buildings used to be made of many smaller bricks, now they're fewer, larger pieces. But that's just what's on the shelves. There's a complete line of very good train sets that are largely only available from lego shop at home. The same is also true for technic sets.
I've played with erector sets and I believe that they can't compare to lego technic. Lego technic has transmissions, differentials, crown gears, bicycle style chains, spring-loaded pieces, pneumatics, and electric lights and motors, as well as countless connectors in all shapes and sizes that can produce literally anything. As an example, I'm currently working on a motorized Lego gatling gun.
So to me, lego is easily more advanced than erector sets. As an example, have a look at set #8888, which is the black super car. It had a v8 with working pistons, a working transmission, 4 wheel steering, 4 wheel independant suspension, and 4 wheel drive through three differentials and constant velocity joints.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
check out this beauty
more engeneerabe bits & pieces than you could shake an erection-set at!
AND it teaches kids some (very) basic programming concepts
Man, i wish i was 8 again
echo "attack cat" > /dev/lego
A private monopoly is the worst of all worlds - no competition and no redress through the ballot box. Quite how any government could support the creation of private monopolies was always beyond me - if anyone but the government had tried it the Monoplies and Mergers Commission (i.e. the government) would have blocked it as being illegal and against the public interest.
The problems with the UK rail system are entirely managerial and at root are almost entirely political. Engineers are powerless in the utter mess that is the current UK rail system whether they played with Lego or Meccano as kids.
Nic (OO developer type, played with Lego. That figures)
The "Doing the best I can with what I've got" mentality goes a long way when you've got limited funds/resources to complete a task. If you've got exactly what you need, there's little thought going into completing the task (Windshield piece goes here, rather than 4 right angled plugs attached by technic rods make a frame, and if I want glass, I'll just borrow some of my Mum's cling film.)
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Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
Nowadays, Lego comes in HUGE custom pieces. The sheer number of blocks you get in a Lego set these days is tiny compared to when I was 10. It involves a lot less thinking.
You could draw a parallel with Windows/Linux. Linux comes in lots of little pieces (in a big box of course), and to get your OS to work the way you want it to, you have to make sure all those pieces are compatable.
With Windows, you get huge custom pieces that can't be used for much else than the picture on the front of the box.
Modern Lego just dumbs the whole process down if you ask me.
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Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
I never really liked Lego. But Meccano/Erector Set also seemed pretty limited. To me, the most interesting construction toy was Fischer Technik. It offered many more options for building mechanical devices than either Lego or Meccano, and it offered analog and digital control circuitry, as well as computer interfaces, long before Lego. Fischer Technik is still a great system for prototyping and is actually used in industry for that purpose.
British Engineers have spent too long playing with Mechano (or Lego) and too little time playing Monopoly.
The common view from within Britain is that they can come up with innovative products but have no idea of how to successfully market them. British Engineers have a tendency to work without regard to the $$ (or ££, or wherever you get that funny euro symbol).
<-- You are here.
"Programming in C, assembler, and lower level langauges teaches more about how a computer works that do the higher level languages..."
But neither one teaches anything about computer science, which is what you are professing to defend.
Computer science is about algorithms, combinatorics, etc. I agree that an assembly programmer is likely to be better (at least in the max performance per unit machine sense) and that "today's programmers" would do well to learn some of the low-level stuff...but I don't agree you gain any insight into the fundamentals of the science through these exercises.
--
324006
Here in the U.S
Remeber my statment was made as a concession in the context of arguing against the notion that all privitisation of public utilities was undesirable. It is true, my statement is probably guilty of being somewhat sweeping.
I can't speak specifically for the US, but I am sure that there must be examples of privately owned utilities delivering good service given even a lack of competition. Undoubtedly too there are examples of horrendously mismanaged publically owned utilities. Moreover, the very dichotomy between public and privately owned is probably a gross oversimplification of the various shades of gray that exist in the form of complex regulatory schemes, mixed ownership, contracting out &tc...
However, as a poster below pointed out, government onwed instrumentalities, where there is a failure of the democratic process (through corruption, vote buying, dictatorship etc), as well as privately owned facilities where there is a failure of competition have a tendency to under-perform.
Perhaps too, the fact that private ownership of utilites seems to be much more traditional in the US, as opposed to the swift ideologically driven privatisations in the UK, Australia etc accounts for the apparent difference of experience. There may be a psychological propensity to put more into a company you (or your ancestors) have built up from scratch, rather than one you buy to siphon off as much cash as quickly as you can. Also a longer time allows for greater (and more honed) regulatory control to be established.
Moreover, the recent spate of privitisation suffered by us must be seen in the context of an overall social program which has resulted in a decline of living standards for most people and much social anger. Given that the US was always more geared to private ownership of public goods, it might not be the easiest place to observe the effects caused by such a shift in social policy.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Dude, Lego/Meccano, they're toys. Get a grip.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Sorry to all those non-brits who are reading this. The problem actually lies with the attitudes of industry and the educational establishments. Who the hell wants to work in that stuffy British culture of shirts, ties and autocratic bosses. Then there are the toothless institutes that are totaly out of touch with young engineers and do nothing to encorage interest in the subject. I trained for 6 years to get into engineering, and even with a good degree and some experience I could earn more as a car salesman or IT support analyst. Engineering in england sucks because of the older generation and their ancient attitudes.
That would mean that we would by now have a bunch of teenagers running around in dark rooms, listening to monotonous music and eating pills..
alfakrøll
Construx was better. Get a Construx Spaceship and ram it into a Lego Spaceship. See which one will stay in one piece.
California's recent electricity problems (the result of botched deregulation, not of privatization) aside, private ownership of these critical infrastructure components has not been an overall bad thing.
I have an engineering degree, but as I write software for a living, I refer to myself as a programmer or a developer.
It riles my ire when I overhear the wire-puller/tape monkeys in my building refer to themselves as "network engineers". Puh-leeze.
As for what I did as a kid myself (and therefore, what I swear by), my favorite toys encompassed the following:
- Meccano - I had a fairly large set with a motor, but the gears never meshed very well, even in the designs they listed.
- Construx - Now THIS one was fun, especially since the holes in the interconnecting blocks were the same diameter as the screws from the meccano set. I ended up making a few really weird hybrid designs. The other nice thing about it was that it could make very large things... One year I built a (lifesize) model of Johnny 5 (from Short Circuit) that could move back and forth and blink lots of lights. This set could also, if you were careful, mount the radio-shack project kits.
- Radio Shack Project Kits - The electronics kits. Too bad these don't exist in Canada anymore. I had 4 or 5 of these things, and the 200 even had some logic circuits. Fun devices. I got my first one at age 7.
- My Commodore 128 - Yup, nice machine. Great for hacking, I turned the joystick port into an output port one year, and ran a robot (Construx with relays and transistors breadboarded to the top) under computer control. I must have been about 11 at the time.
- Breadboards + 7400-series logic - Got some of these when I was 11, learned lots about digital circuits, got me well-started in digital design. I surprised the community-college instructor when I showed him my design for an adder circuit (the standard design, of course, but I figured it out
;)
I remember that I thought Lego technic was really cool, but normal lego was pretty restrictive. I also had a set called Robotix, which was really nice for building complicated robotics with, but pretty limited in other ways. Bah, I did manage to build a pick-and-place out of it...Now I'm taking engineering, and everybody is like "How do you know so much?". Bah, when they were out playing with their dolls (or whatever the guys were doing, since there ARE a lot more of them in engineering), I was building stages for mine with working amplified sounds and lighting systems ;)
Anybody who thinks that kids don't learn from their toys should think again.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I agree with the Lego Mindstorms and Technic sets. In fact, I bought the first Technic set that came out in the late 70's(the infamous Auto Chassis - AWESOME!) Truthfully, the Technic sets led me into falling in love with engineering. Today, I am a software engineer and yes,the software programming bundle that comes with the the Mindstorms is basic, but many have developed other platforms to make this amazing and wonderful set even more powerful. Java (http://lejos.sourceforge.net/) and C(NQC)(http://www.enteract.com/~dbaum/nqc/) have wonderful APIs to program the programmable block. This article is baloney - another example of British resentment for losing their dominance. Wake up it's 2001, not 1901!
I don't know about anyone else, but I still pull out the toolboxes full of Legos every once in a while. In fact, the university I attend/work at uses Lego as a part of its Freshman Engineering Seminar course. I got to work a bit with them. Primarily, the course uses a large "computer" block that houses an MPU of some sort that can be programmed via some other Win software. This block could drive other pieces, like motors or light emitters/sensors. The class's assignment was to build something that followed an electrical-tape path on a large board. One group made a sweet-looking crab-walker thing.
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> feels that the falling popularity of Meccano > and the rise of Lego is inextricably linked > to "the demise of British engineering." That's like saying public message boards that allow anyone to post are leading to the demise of logical, well thought out public debate & discussion... Err, wait a minute.