If done incorrectly, this message could backfire. At that age, the worst label a job can have is "boring". If anybody can do it, it's no longer interesting.
Not that the author is doing it incorrectly -- letting kids play with pieces of the factory process is very much the opposite of boring.
It's only later on in life to kids get hammered into them that they can't do hard things.
https://constructionreviewonline.com/intels-20-billion-ohio-...
You might not expect a bespoke 2 ton electric train engine to be made in a series of garages but it really is. One lot of workers will be experts at winding coils. They'll have a rig that spins and a spool of copper to wind on with a practiced skill so that they do it as well as any multi million dollar machine could. Then there will be another shop that forges an engine housing. They'll shape out a cast in sand and pour in molten steel (produced by another nearby shop) into the cast to make the housing. Another shop will make the brushes, another the motor controller, etc.
The end result? You travel to Shenzen to build a bespoke megawatt scale electric motor and you have a prototype delivered in 3 days. Not even kidding. It's not some megafactory where you will never be worth their time for an order of 10 engines to replace aging motors in a custom 20year old fleet. It's a set of people in rooms making things for low price point at exceptional scale that are easily outcompeting the western "bigger is better" style.
The USA seems crazy with it's focus on mega corps or nothing honestly. Every law seems to encourage this - eg. The healthcare system which absolutely harms small business owners who have no ability to negotiate a corporate health care plan. How do you ever develop a Shenzen style manufacturing culture in such an environment? How does a megafactory that makes a billion of one thing innovate rapidly? You need the multitude of garage workshops that collectively fill every niche that Shenzen has. Today if the West was cut off from Chinese goods we'd be stuck in so many ways. We just don't have what China's enabled here.
I like the idea that we can teach children to feel inspiration instead of intimidation when learning how things work
Factories are places for the mass production of identical or nearly identical widgets.
There are some kinds of mass produced software, like the low value apps that lots of businesses want to have for some reason and that should have been websites instead.
But actual progress comes from software that isn't mass produced. So choose your ambitions wisely.
I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing.
Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year.
It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers).
I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing around, and how it’s neat to learn new techniques that you can combine together.
I talked about prototyping and design – and was sure to use the words “prototyping” and “design”. I showed exploratory sketches and what CAD looks like.
I handed round various iterations of e-paper screens, and electronics from breadboard to PCB, and various iterations of plastic parts.
It’s interesting to see how a plastic enclosure comes apart, and to connect that to what an injection moulding machine is doing.
(A lot of the kids are familiar with 3D printers, so I showed a timelapse of a 3D print – it would take a year to print all my clocks! And then a real-time video of injection moulding, and how that would only take a day.)
And then photos of factory floors, and here’s the team, and assembly lines and what a page from an assembly procedure looks like, and packaging too.
7 year olds have great questions.
Like: how does it not break in the post?
Well here’s a vibration machine in action and that’s how we test it.
And, look, in this cardboard packaging, here’s a cradle, and this was made by a packaging designer – you could be a packaging designer too if you want.
Like: how does the button work?
Well you’re right I didn’t pass round the separate button piece, good spot, it’s small and I didn’t want to lose it. So now let’s talk about assembly and about industrial designers…
I don’t like those videos of factories that are supposed to inspire awe.
You know the ones I mean: you see a thousand products a second whizzing by on 20 parallel belts. You come away saying wow. When they showed manufacturing on kid’s TV when I was growing up, that was what they showed.
“Awe” is the opposite of what I want to convey.
Except for a very specific types of person, when you show something with the expectation that “awe” is the appropriate response, you are implicitly saying to your audience: you should step back here and appreciate this from a distance. Like looking at a great work of art. Gasp but do not place yourself in the picture.
Whereas!
I want to re-home manufacturing. I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.
So my message is: sure this is complicated but it’s fine, we can do complicated.
Factories are just rooms.
The stuff around us isn’t divine - these chairs we’re sitting on, the TV at the front of the classroom, the pots for the plants - all this stuff was invented and figured out and made by people.
p.s. you can be one of those people.
So when I heard the class was learning about inventing, I offered to go in and show that scrappy dead ends are cool actually (it was amazing to speak with a class that already knows the word “prototyping”) and this is electronics and this is going from sketching to plastic and this is what it means to make a product and to sell it.
I deeply feel this mission to normalise getting our hands dirty with the world – when they’re 7 years old, while their brains are still establishing what’s normal.
(This is connected with what I was saying about training for collective efficacy.)
And I’m just someone’s dad, you know? So if this guy can do it…
If you have the opportunity to go into your local school and talk about making things too, please do. You will be rewarded with wonderful curiosity, engagement and questions from the kids.
Hopefully one of them one day will look around them, think “someone should do something about that”, remember back, and say - oh that someone can be ME.