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by jamesbritt 4928 days ago
What do you mean by "same stuff"?

Were you selling kits and tools to people who might not have previously thought of themselves as makers, making it super easy to jump in and get started? This is what I think she's got the attention for.
2 comments
meaty 4928 days ago
Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap.

Everyone sold the tools, kits and parts already. All that had been achieved is the application of hype and turning a bunch of prepackaged modules into a way of excusing the user from having to know what the hell they are doing.

It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.

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danilocampos 4928 days ago
> Yeah I actually designed two kits for maplin in the 90s before they started shipping velleman shit and containers full of Chinese plastic crap.

Sounds like you're actually embarrassed that she succeeded where you did not.

> It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.

Like the iPad is "just" a big iPhone.

Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise.

To shit on this is the most deplorable, counterproductive elitism.

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meaty 4928 days ago
Most people who benefit from these sorts of products don't have a firm grasp of math and engineering to start with. Our education sucks in the US. Giving them a helping hand is a terrific way to swell the ranks of STEM professionals and introduce people to solving problems they would never have considered otherwise.

Just teach them engineering! Not pussy foot around and molly coddle them.

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pyre 4928 days ago
Your approach to this comes across as the equivalent of lamenting the state of 'kids these days' because 'back in the day,' if you did something wrong the priest would 'beat some sense into you.'

Some people find the idea of engineering and/or mathematics intimidating. If approached in the right way, it will 'click' for them, or at the very least their fears can be assuaged (allowing them to pursue higher learning). I take two issues with your posts here:

1) From your posts here, your approach sounds like you want to 'beat some engineering fundamentals into them.' You say that you've mentored others, so I can't believe that this is actually your approach, but your posts come across this way. This may be at lease some of the reason that people are reacting the way they are to you.

2) You seem to be lamenting the fact that some people will work on these kits, and never go further with the 'higher learning' aspect. This is to be expected. There will never be a way to convert 100% of those curious into the One True Path of Engineering Enlightenment(tm). At the very least, the people that only dabble will get past the idea that all of this 'technology stuff' is some sort of voodoo magic that the majority of the population seems to believe.

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meaty 4928 days ago
You are correct. I don't "beat" it into them - I spent literally years doing 1:1 with people and providing learning material, defining tasks and milestones and days in the lab.

I want people to react to this because I think the issue requires some consideration. We're losing and compartmentalising knowledge to the point that people have no idea what they're really doing any more.

There is no one true path of engineering enlightenment but there is some magic when someone actually really understands what they're doing.

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voltagex_ 4928 days ago
Most people will balk at that though. They may not balk at a noisemaker kit, or a build-your-own-universal remote.
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jamesbritt 4928 days ago
It's turned engineering into painting by numbers powered by social hype.

I think you're grossly undervaluing that.

Painting by numbers, as goofy as it seems, allows relatively non-skilled people to create approximations of art. For some, that's enough. For others, that taste of making a painting motivates them to want to do more. Just getting people to pick up a paint brush and mess around with some paints can be an amazing trigger.

The social aspect may help people see that, having assembled some basic Arduino thing, they could make it do a few other cool things, and other people like themselves (i.e. non-geeks) have done it, and will show them how.

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leoedin 4928 days ago
How can you be so negative about something which is providing a low-barrier entry point into electronics? Surely even if a few more people buy one of these kits and then start developing stuff themselves it's a good thing?

I know that my entry to electronics was assembly workshops run by the local university at a science fair. Every year you could buy an electronic kit and assemble it (following instructions) into something that did something (normally it was fairly useless). I don't think I understood what was happening in that kit at all, but it introduced me to the concept of electronics as something that you could work with.

I think the problem is you're assuming that the users would otherwise know more, when in fact it's more likely that if they weren't provided the tools by adafruit they'd know even less about electronics.

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tcoop25 4928 days ago
Where is the off button on this guy?
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eaurouge 4928 days ago
Yes, hobbyist electronic kits were available, both in the US and the UK, in the 90s.
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gregpilling 4928 days ago
I had some in the late 70s or early 80s. Canada
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MaysonL 4928 days ago
Back in the early '60s (or late '50s) I had a thing called a Brainiac kit[0] - a minor league version of an IBM wire panel: I wired it up to play tic-tac-toe.

[0] http://www.word-detective.com/2007/07/brainiac/

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