Engineering challenges for children during lockdown | Hacker News Reader

Engineering challenges for children during lockdown

jamesdysonfoundation.com

110 pointstumidpandora18 comments

"Dyson engineers have designed these challenges specifically for children."

I'm certain that's not true.

Balloon cars, was a school thing at least a decade ago. Spaghetti bridges has been used in Scouting as a challenge for 30+ years that I know of.

The only one I've not seen before is cardboard boats, and I'd be amazed if that's novel.

I suspect it's more like: "a junior content producer for our social media found these in 20 mins".

This is a pretty cynical viewpoint. All ideas "have been done before" but the Dyson team took the time to assemble these, get their team to actually design them to be digestible by non-engineers, and produced a wonderful website and set of videos. Hopefully, it inspires others to take an interest in the STEM fields, and they'll eventually build upon the ideas of others.

I'm an engineer, but I'm also a dad. I greatly appreciate the fact that they've done the work for me. Pretty sure 95% of my job is taking the work of others and slapping it together with some paint. That's most of humanity.

I'm with @pbhjpbhj here. These are pretty run of the mill, and if child(ren) haven't already done most of these in school (or at home), I'd be very surprised.

I have no problem with Dyson engineers collating them, and I'm sure there's some value in that (although there are plenty of books from the 70s and beyond with similar (if not identical) collections; but I do take issue with them claiming that "Dyson engineers have designed these challenges" like they are somehow new or special.

> if child(ren) haven't already done most of these in school (or at home), I'd be very surprised.

Then prepare for this shock: 99% of children are not given the opportunity to engage in engineering challenges like these. Heck, even in my affluent milieu, a minority engaged in the available programs.

In districts across out relatively affluent nation, children are getting abysmally poor educations with schools acting as little more than under-staffed daycares. I cannot fathom the levels of wealth and privilege that make these commonplace poverties illegible to you.

It's more the claim to have designed the challenges. I was excited to read them, and then heavily disappointed to just have a short list of stock, well-known ideas.

Take spaghetti-bridges, what exactly did Dyson _engineers_ design there? To meet the title, IMO, they'd need to have tested different novel design ideas, chosen design aspects, and extended those aspects.

Cheap marketing looks cheap.

I look forward to being contradicted, whereby Dyson engineers share their notebook pages on how they designed these challenges ...

Of course, I agree with you that it's dishonest. It's the typical dishonesty of marketing. All marketing is dishonest. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you can't trust marketing. You can't trust corporations, and you can't trust marketing.

It's taking a long time to load for me. The latest Archive link loads much faster:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200424011530/https://www.james...

They're interesting challenges, but I thought the idea of a challenge was to be challenging, ie. Can you figure out how to do it? The challenges give away the sollution straight away.

> Please note that the activities contained here in are intended for children ages seven and above. Adult supervision is recommended for all projects.

Explain it to the adults, so they can make sure the children will get a success?

If you like those kinds of things, check out the tinkering studio page from the San Francisco Exploratorium. My wife works at a similar space in our local science museum (shut down now) and a lot of them are trying to see what they can do to get "virtual". https://www.exploratorium.edu/tinkering/projects

The actual "Challenge Cards" that the videos reference can be downloaded here: https://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/content/dam/pdf/US%20ch...

Popups and videos that don't load. UX failzone.

Who has that much spaghetti on hand?

Also my local grocery store is limiting how much spaghetti you can buy...

Who has that much spaghetti on hand?

You seen the code I'm working on?

This made me chuckle.

Turns out spaghetti isn't that hard to make.

I'm not sure fresh spaghetti is going to work that well, but I'd be interested in seeing the video of you trying!

You drape the spaghetti over a dowel, let it dry, and cut it before you try to build a bridge with it!

Structural spaghetti is hard to make...

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