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Still more on "mechanical inclination"
November 28, 2007

In yesterday's post (which I will admit was a bit silly) I promised to discuss more about how teenagers spend their money. Stick with me. I'll get there.

I see my buddy Joe (The guy who retired from Argonne National Labs and has the sawmill, among other things.) at church. A couple weeks ago he showed me an article in the November/December issue of Live Steam & Outdoor Railroading magazine. (You can visit their Website, but I don't think you can read articles online.) It was the first installment of an article entitled "Steam Holiday in Poland." Long story short, there's a company in England that has struck an agreement with the Polish National Railway to maintain a working roundhouse and group of steam locomotives in daily service on a branch line. If you have the cash, you can go over there and play engineer on a real train. This is not some railway museum where you move a locomotive at 5 mph back and forth on a mile of straight track. They put you in the cab of a locomotive at the head of an honest-to-goodness passenger train running on mainline tracks on a schedule at speeds reaching 60 mph. The author, who has had some locomotive experience, found the experience nothing short of amazing and truly nerve wracking. He says, "We're clearly not in Kansas anymore. Just the idea of letting a total stranger run the regular passenger train at 60 mph is totally unheard of in the west. They must have shot every remaining lawyer and insurance agent in Poland before they started this thing!" It makes for very interesting reading and I will followup with subsequent installments.

"OK," you say, "what does this have to do with how teenagers spend their money?"

Joe and I were discussing the type of person this would appeal to, besides us, and what kind of person reads a magazine like Live Steam. (I was a subscriber a few years ago.) It comes back to those we describe as "mechanically inclined" which relates to the larger industrial skills gap.

Joe was bemoaning the fact that his teenage grandson will spend money on a video game, but would never consider buying a socket set to work on an old car. We could update this statement from an old car and make it a robotics project. I doubt there is any practical skill that can be learned from simply playing a video game, other than possibly improved eye / hand coordination.

I'm afraid playing video games will not train the next generation of engineers. Someone who develops mechanical skills as a youngster will have a much stronger predisposition. How do we encourage it? Can that even replace engineering training? More tomorrow.

Posted by Peter Welander on November 28, 2007 | Comments (0)