November 2011

Play Time

Kids + toys = excited young engineers.

BY BENJAMIN ROODE

National Building Museum exhibition visitors can build their own structures in the "LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition" play pit. They are then invited to place their structures on a map of LEGO city. Photo by: Kevin Allen / The National Building Museum

When Eric West, P.E., designed his first multimodal intersection in Texas back in 1983, he wasn't a licensed professional engineer. The intersection was not designed to state standards. Photographic evidence shows possible deterioration of a sea wall near the intersection and a structurally unsound shopping center. Or is it an airport?

While some might decry the apparent lack of design and construction oversight on the project, West might offer a unique justification for performing engineering outside his area of expertise.

He was only nine, and LEGO bricks don't settle too well on carpet.

West, an NSPE member who is now a principal at Parkhill, Smith & Cooper Inc. in Midland, Texas, credits LEGO and other toys from his childhood like Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys with enriching his engineering mind and providing an outlet for the creative, spatial ideas that already existed in his head.

"It wasn't that toys led me to [engineering] but that I was expressing something that was in me before I knew what that was," West says. "At a minimum, it encouraged the part of me that became a civil engineer."

LEGO prides itself on making a toy that can teach without overtly teaching, says Michael McNally, brand relations manager for LEGO in North America. Where children (and sometimes adults) usually follow the included instructions, free play and simple tinkering often lead users to the basic tenets of engineering without their knowledge.

"If you ask them 'what are you doing?' they won't say they're engineering a model, they'll say they're trying to get it to not fall apart," McNally says. That happens through trial and error, testing, and learning from mistakes, the roots of engineering practice.

Toys like LEGO and Erector and software games like SimCity nurture those qualities and have inspired many to join the ranks of engineering and, in some cases, become PEs. When it comes to getting kids on the engineering track, some say those little plastic bricks, metal rivets, and mouse clicks can build a foundation.
 
Designed To Teach
LEGO tries to incorporate a sense of education, critical thinking, and advanced design into each of its sets, McNally says. LEGO sets are also becoming more realistic. LEGO launched space shuttle, satellite launch pad, and moon rover sets earlier this year to give kids more realistic space foundations, compared to previous sets with fantasy-driven space themes. Children see how real-world things are built and can do it themselves.

Places like the National Building Museum bet on LEGO's popularity with young children and the toy's flexibility. Their exhibit, "LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition," running through September 3, 2012, aims to draw attention to engineering by using a medium with which many non-engineers can identify and don't think about on a daily basis, says Scott Kratz, the museum's vice president for education. The exhibit features LEGO replicas of famous buildings built by certified LEGO professional builder and architect Adam Reed Tucker.

"I think LEGO is such a great way to explore the built environment through these hands-on toys," he says. "You can see [a building]…and think about the engineering, think about how that building was built. How do you get a building over a mile tall to stand up? How do you build the St. Louis arch?"

"Then you get a chance to build your own structure," connecting the educational and stimulating aspects of LEGO, Kratz says, referring to a part of the exhibit where kids and adults can try erecting their own LEGO landscapes.

It's that connection that Brian Hannon, P.E., and NSPE member, says LEGO made for him when developing the skills he uses on the job now as a project engineer with Moore & Bruggink Consulting Engineers in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

"I can definitely see how [engineering] skills were developed at an early age. We always had an inkling toward that kind of stuff," Hannon says.

But prebuilt sets and simple blocks are just part of the effort.

LEGO Mindstorms lets users take their LEGO ideas to a more functional level by providing the tools to build useable robots and other machines that can perform tasks or simply give motion to previously static creations. In the FIRST LEGO League, students compete against one another to develop robots that can carry out certain tasks.

Student competitors say even though they were interested in engineering topics or hands-on tasks before joining, the FIRST LEGO League has stimulated their desire to enter this and other fields. Members of the New Jersey-based Landroids team say participation has jump-started their already healthy interest in science, technology, engineering, and math. The team won an innovation award at the FIRST LEGO League 2011 World Championship and lists numerous awards on its Web site, www.landroids.org.

"Before this, I didn't know what I wanted to do," says Gage Farestad, 15, who specializes in digital design of some of Team Landroids's creations. "From being in this and on the team I can definitely say I want to do something with engineering and science."

Teammate Ivana Chu adds: "When you do this kind of stuff, it's kind of the beginning. When you're interested in science, it's something you don't really stop being interested in."

Some engineering firms are latching onto Mindstorms and FIRST as a recruiting tool. Rockwell Collins, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based engineering firm, sponsors FIRST events and partners with teams, says spokeswoman Cindy Dietz. They're hoping to engage a new generation of engineers to replace retiring baby boomers. The firm has a question on its internship and job applications asking if potential employees were in FIRST or other similar engineering groups or competitions, giving a small preference to those applicants who can show they participated. They expect to see their first applicants with ties to the competitions in early 2012.

"We used to do this just because it was the right thing to do," Dietz says. "Now, more and more we're driving toward metrics."
 
Proto Production
LEGO wasn't the first engineering toy, by far.

Some cite Erector sets as one of the first true engineering toys. The metal girders, bolts, and nuts invented by A.C. Gilbert in the early 1910s was truly an original thinking-child's toy, says author Bruce Watson in his biography of Gilbert, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made.

"That fall," he writes, referring to 1913, when toy distributors first began noticing and buying up Erector sets, "toy stores, hardware stores, and department stores began selling the first toy that did not talk down to kids or treat them like an audience at a Punch and Judy show, the first toy that let them build and design, think and imagine, fail and succeed."

When NSPE Past President Bernie Berson, P.E., of Perrineville, New Jersey, was little, just after World War II, he remembers building various contraptions out of Erector sets and Lincoln Logs.

While those may not have directly inspired him to take a surveying job during college, they definitely kindled in him a love for tinkering and design, he says. Windmills, pulleys, cabins, forts, houses, anything could be constructed when Berson had those toys at his fingertips. He harnessed the intellectual stimulation and imagination Watson speaks of in his book.

"I felt powerful, I felt like I could make things happen," he says. "It's just something that gave me satisfaction."

Teachers didn't identify such aptitude and proficiency when Berson attended school, so a lucky job placement with a surveyor connected him to the design and engineering world. The job rekindled the love of form, design, and accuracy that he found when using Erector. When he returned to school after the summer of surveying work, he switched majors from writing to civil engineering.

"I suspect I enjoyed it so much [because] I was able to do it as a kid," he says. "That part re-emerged" and was rediscovered during his surveying job. "If I didn't get that summer job, I might be working in a shoe store."

Classic engineering toys extended their intellectual influence from the Greatest Generation to the Me Decade.

Kelli Jo Hoffman, P.E., used her mother's Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys, kept pristine in her grandparents' basement. Whereas Erector resembled girders and Tinkertoys technically made structures and shapes, the Logs actually looked like something Hoffman could use in real life to build a building, she says. That initial connection led to her interest in math and science in middle and high schools and, eventually, engineering.

"I took to Lincoln Logs because those looked more like something real. The others were more abstract," Hoffman says.

"Once you're already in that mind frame…you tend to gravitate to your comfort zones," she says. "By the time I got to high school, I got the engineering idea from teachers."

Trial and error, a hallmark of LEGO's education strategy, is what stuck with Hoffman from play room to work site. She didn't even need the toys, she says: She remembers seeing which type of airplane—one made of paper or one of foam—would fly better. Learning the trial-and-error dynamic as a child is good because there are few consequences with a failed Lincoln Log house. It also built part of the base upon which Hoffman's engineering career rests.

"What I design every day doesn't just affect people's lives, it affects whether they stay alive," says the structural engineer for Engineering Resource Associates Inc. in Illinois. "Not everyone can deal with that, which is why some people choose less liability and personal accountability. The toys were probably a small step in it, but it's really more of a personality and values set."

Hoffman bought some old Lincoln Logs several years ago for her children. While they're still too young to play, those kids will be tinkering like Hoffman was in her youth, she says.
 
Building the Future
From low-tech wooden logs to high-tech digital readouts, engineering toys have evolved.

SimCity started as a simple simulation for the Commodore 64 computer in 1985. It eventually became part of classroom lessons and the annals of PC games. The game, which saw wide release in 1989, lets players design a city of their own, taking into account public demand, budgeting, public services, and natural disaster response.

The Engineers Week Foundation has used the SimCity line of games in its Future City competition since 1999.

It has become a cornerstone of the competition, firmly cemented in the design phase.
Future City teacher/coaches, like Jon Pfund at the St. John Lutheran School in Rochester, Michigan, say some students are attracted to the program when they hear a computer game is involved. It becomes much more than a game when they realize just how much is involved in building and running a city of the future, he says.

"Kids that might have computer talent join the team, but then they also get involved in brainstorming, helping write the essay, and presentation, and that kind of draws them in as they realize they have talents in other places," Pfund says.

Not only does the game attract students who otherwise might not even consider engineering or science as a pastime or career, it helps those students branch into other learning areas like presentation, teamwork, brainstorming, and creative problem solving, Pfund says. Not only is the program drawing kids into the design world, they're learning skills for the business side of engineering.

Linda Gerhardt, a chemical engineer who assists the St. John team, says the game is more than a teaching toy. It's as close to the real-life engineering business as students this age can get. Incorporating more than building, something that can be accomplished with LEGO, shows the multiple concerns engineers must consider in their field.

"It's allowing them to see that everything you do, everything causes something else to happen," she says.

On getting students excited about engineering? "The kids are tuned in to video games, so it's a way to talk to them through things they enjoy," Gerhardt says. "It's a good way to teach that you can't do with books or Web sites."

And the connection SimCity makes with some students has paid off for the industry, Pfund says. One of the first students he worked with on Future City about 14 years ago is now a civil engineer designing cities and buildings in Dubai. She has returned to show what Future City and SimCity could lead to for ambitious students.

It's that kind of connection—one that starts with SimCity or LEGO but can end with lessons from working engineers—that can help drive engineering forward, Eric West says.

"It's up to us as an engineering profession to make sure those kids out there know that there's a profession that allows them to do that for the rest of their lives," he says.