All high school students should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before graduating.
What we want is wood shop and machine shop classes.
Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts.
Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
This would be a big help but maybe too little too late. Maybe we just enjoyed an era of living off the backs of Chinese labor. Now with their increasing wealth, their own desire to move up the chain and their abysmal birthrates, that era is ending.
India also does not have a great birthrate and other structural problems while other asian countries dont have the numbers to completely replace China. It might be that many products we enjoyed just dont make sense anymore if no other country is willing to pick up the slack or there isn't some amazing innovation in automation. Other products might survive with massive inflation.
Watch how this simple bluetooth speaker is made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U
Look at how many people are there to assemble the speaker at MSRP ~20-25$ per speaker.
Does that make sense in a world where those folks aren't being paid the wages that they are or they don't exist anymore because they have retired?
We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs.
This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
I think what most changed music and mechanics was the transition from suburbia to flatsharing in the city centers.
3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
So at least some of our students are being given the opportunity, and there are multiple paths to success, but maybe the largest difference is that while truly talented multi disciplinary young engineers (and I work with a few) are rare, they always have been. The real questions are probably around social issues, does giving your kid a phone remove the boredom that encourages them to tinker with stuff in the garage, is there a sweet spot of being able to afford an old car, but to poor to pay to fix it, force kids to learn hands on repair skills. Does being able to stop at radio shack/surplus/frys/metal supply/etc and browse racks of stuff on the way home from school encourage kids to build stuff to impress their friends, or is having it delivered in the mail enough. AKA, like me the other day, I stopped a microcenter to get a pedestrian computer peripheral I could have ordered from amazon, but discovered a ESP camera module that gave me 'ideas'.
3D printing would be good too, because on the surface it's just "model -> filament -> extruder -> built". But as anyone who has done 3D printing knows, it's constantly fighting 20 different parameters to try and coax your print to actually work out well. And even when you have it nailed down there are still 20 different things that can randomly sabotage it. And even with all that accounted for you still sometimes get off prints.
This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.