EnergyFactor By ExxonMobil | Pespectives has a new home

Tech toys instead of tablets

“How do you show young minds obsessed with apps that what’s inside the machine can be as interesting as what’s on the screen?”

That’s a great question, asked this week by the Wall Street Journal’s Personal Technology columnist, Geoffrey A. Fowler.

Fowler’s column explored some new toys designed to make children smarter – or as he put it, toys that “are about building technology, not just consuming it.”

He recommends giving such innovative toys as gifts instead of simply resorting to tablets, and I concur. Purdue University’s College of Engineering Education, meanwhile, recently offered a gift guide of toys and games designed to make engineering concepts fun and accessible to young students.

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In a broad sense, these efforts align with what ExxonMobil has been trying to achieve with our Be an Engineer initiative.

For a long time I have felt it is hard to understand and appreciate the wonders of technology if one doesn’t understand the basics of how a particular technology works.

Similarly, I worry that many children are growing up with a great facility with electronics, but little understanding of the underlying ingenuity that has produced the marvels at the heart of our personal technology revolution.

That theme was echoed in Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators, which I wrote about not long ago.

When Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and other pioneers of innovation were growing up, they tinkered with primitive electronics and built devices from do-it-yourself kits. Disassembling and reassembling them over and over, they gained an understanding of circuits and transistors, and they learned how to engineer computers and other devices. One can trace these early efforts (both the failures and successes) to what these individuals would later dream and achieve.

Today, it is different.

Some of those interviewed by Isaacson lamented how kids now burst from the womb seemingly able to handle the latest in electronics. But since their smartphones and tablets come fully designed and encased, we may be breeding generations of students with no conception of the circuitry and engineering inside.

This holiday season – and in the birthdays and celebrations to follow – we would do well to follow the wisdom of Irving Pressley McPhail, the president and chief executive officer of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

Writing here in Perspectives, he reminisced about the joy and importance of buying toys as simple as Legos for his grandchildren, so they could get an early start on the path to becoming the engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs that the future will require.

As Geoffrey Flowers’ column shows, Dr. McPhail (and those of us at ExxonMobil) are not the only ones thinking about how our society can encourage youngsters to pursue the fascinating world of science and engineering.

Hopefully this passion will grow as readers finish their holiday shopping this weekend – and we begin a New Year.

 


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