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."

Comments

Technic, anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Well mate, here's a hint

[Tet]

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...

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 :-(

Lugnet debate on this

[blech]

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.

Legos = Kids, Meccanos = Older Kids

[scotpurl]

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.

Both had strong points, but...

[Kenneth]

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.

Re:Well mate, here's a hint

[_xen]

There is nothing wrong with privatisation per se.

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!!

The same applies to software

[Chairboy]

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.

Re:The same applies to software

[bockman]

And nowadays with universities considering (or allready have) switching to Java as their teaching language, the problem will only get worse

If you want to teach how computers work, go for C (with some assembler).
But if you want to teach logic and algorithms, such as sorting, stacks, etc ..., then higher level languages do a better job, because students are less distracted by syntax and hosekeeping problems.

Railtrack is at fault, not Lego!

[Dr_Cheeks]

Spot on there - the railways were constructed just fine, but then woefully neglected, particularly under the management of Railtrack. for those who don't live in the UK, Railtrack is the private body who took over management of the national rail network when it was privatised (and it was split up into several regional operators instead of just British Rail). This was supposed to improve services and revenue, but in fact it stinks.

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.

Well mate, here's a hint

[CaptainZapp]

Meccano teaches engineering and architectural skills in a way that Lego doesn't. If we had more Meccano, we would have railways that worked.

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...

Re:Well mate, here's a hint

[Yorrike]

You're talking out your arse.

New Zealand has a privatised electricity production industry and it keeps electricity prices down. It's a little thing called competition.

Repeat loud and clear: If any infrastructure of national importance is outsourced to a private entity with competiton, prices and service will plummet and sky rocket respectively. The reason? Money. If people don't like your prices or service, they'll likely to drop you and give their cash to your competiton.

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.

So mate, next time you want to go ranting about privatisation being "bad", kindly remove your blinkers and look at more than one case before forming an opinion.

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Don't blame Lego for Railtrack

[Elvis Maximus]

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.

-

Re:Don't blame Lego for Railtrack

[ThePilgrim]

Part of the problem is that when Rail Track (RT) took over thy found they wher paying all this people near retirment age to wandet up and down the line every night.

As they where spending all the time streaching their legs and they where so close to retirment age any way RT sacked them.

3 years on RT is wondering where all their enginears are and why no one seams to inspect/understand large sections of the inferstructure any more

yes, but they now they are smarting up again

[Kraft]

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

Not all Lego is created equal

[infinite9]

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.

Lego Dumbs It Down

[Yorrike]

When I was a lad (a mere 10 years ago), Lego came in lots of little pieces. I had to think of ways to make the overall shapes using lots of tiny parts so all of those parts made whatever I was building, work.

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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