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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."
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
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.
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:
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
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.
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..)
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.
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
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!!
- 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
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.
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.
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...
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.
From the Zometools web page:
YOU CAN MAKE...
Squares
Cubes
Triangles
Pyramids
Regular Polygons
And many more!
*yawn*
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
I think the original quote for that was from Kristian Wilson of Nintendo in 1989:
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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.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
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
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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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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