Is the value of play and experimentation being under-estimated?

I agee whole heartedly....

Sometimes education stifles a child's natural curiosity...

Curiosity may kill the cat but it makes scientist and engineers.

(Still got those Ladybird books....last week my daughter dug one out for her friend who's learningto drive and wanted to know what the clutch on the car does )

Could I borrow that! Last week I was trying to explain to my mother, 74 (as it always has to say in local papers)! Apparently I wasn't teh first.

Her solution appears to be to drive an automatic.

For 'Ladybird Book' substitute 'Haynes Manual'.....

Hi Del. I totally agree with you, the kids nowadays play with games consoles and very few of them get to build things out of a set of Meccano like I did. When I was twelve I took apart our lawnmower engine, it cost me a very sore backside, and my father made me put it together again, mind you he did instruct me how to do it. Another thing is that the bloody "elf and safety" mob don't let children do risky experiments at school like we used to, risky as in lighting a match. Spencer.

The chemistry teacher was always Game for a Laugh. Cor!

• Heating up sulphur crystals with a bunsen burner to the extent that most of the lab class was hanging out the windows reaching for some air.
• Watching solid sodium skipping across the surface of a water tank, on fire as a result.
• The reaction to a small fire on a fractionation column as Jenkins leapt for a fire extinguisher? "Oh, don't worry, it will burn itelf out."
• The nitration of toluene did cause a couple of pieces of laboratory glassware to self-disassemble.

Powerful lessons. Enduring memories. Fun....

Yes, the nitration of toluene would cause a big bang if your not carefull. One of my science teachers taught me how to make my own fireworks out of sodium chlorate+sugar+magnesium strip or iron filings, needless to say I made some huge bangs on the 5th of nov. Spencer.

(S)he would probably be dismissed these days....

Your so right!!

Even simple things around us can be used for experiments.

As a youngster I had to water the fodder patch and vegetable garden.

Flood irrigation at that time , You had to keep on diverting the water until all the land was watered.

Used the pumpkin ranks for constructing a water reticulation scheme. (Ok . . punished for playing and ruining the vegetables)

The ranks were later replaced by pipes and later by sprinkler pipes.

My chores got less - Maybe I was lazy - "conservation of energy"

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/11039/bolt-tensioning

See the above!!!

Quite!

Add to the list: model cars. Does anyone remember slot cars? I spent my 3 years of junior high school racing them as a hobby. Great opportunity to spend time with my dad who taught me to measure, to solder, design, and build my own custom cars. I also learned to rewind and "soup up" little electric motors.

Thirty years later as a prototype machinist I was required to do all the machining of a very interesting little robot. When the engineer who designed it showed me the motor he had bought for the robot, I took one look and said "it won't work, not powerful enough". He said he had calculated all the torque requirements and spec-ed it all out. It would work. It didn't. Nothing like practical experience.

One problem with "hobby" level electronic experimentation or even professional prototyping is that the geometry of the parts has made simple tinkering much more difficult. If you don't have a thousand dollar soldering iron a good microscope set up and a steady hand the 12 mil leads on 25 mil centers can be a problem. It's a far cry from the point to point wiring that some of us got started with building vacuum tube projects.

Too right...

I happened to start prototyping my first surface mount stuff at exactly the same time as my eyesight started to show it's age. It took a while for the penny to drop!

The unexplained headaches dissapeared once I got the reading glasses.

You can get some pretty decent used stereo microscopes if you shop around on ebay.

Seriously I was once asked by a 'Quality Manager to write a procedure, with photographs, to show stillage fillers how to stick a label to an open mesh stillage.

I'm still playing and my toys are very educational. trouble is, they are also very expensive!

Nice "Rant", you do a better job that I would have.

I think that you are probably right about the way we got "trained" too.

Well said.

Playing of that type certainly shaped my life. I believe my path was pretty much set by the 2nd grade .. I guess I was about 8. We were to come in for Show & Tell with some type of invention using household items. Well, a few hours of scrounging in every nook and cranny of the house turned up some seemingly useful items. On Friday after a full weeks experimentation and careful refinement, I appeared in class with quite an excellent air powered "rocket launcher"! It was a great hit among my peers as I sent projectiles soaring in beautiful arcs every which way over their heads!

At the time, I didn't really notice any particular reaction from Mrs. Gerry, our kindly matronly teacher. Although she did seem to rush me off the stage a bit sooner than I anticipated, and made me quickly collect my scattered rocket bodies from the classroom floor ... retrieving them from various classmates that were fiddling with them, blowing thru them, etc., if they were lucky enough to have had one touch down near their desk.

I do recall that my parents had recieved a call from Mrs. Gerry regarding my rocket launcher demonstration. I was questioned about it. But in the end, evidently whatever the "situation" was ... it had been settled. My parents said I had a good head on my shoulders. No one else would have thought of making that type of rocket launcher, I was told.

It's only in retrospect, decades later, that I think back and wish I had gotten a good look at, and understood, Mrs. Gerry's reaction to my out-of-the-box homemade rocket launchers that were carefully crafted out of a handful of discarded cardboard tampon insertion tubes that I had discovered in the bathroom wastebasket

Lovely story...it's not often a post that long has a nice smile at the end!

Somehow ... I was absolutely certain that Del would be the first to comment on my rocket launcher story