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Just in time for the holidays ...
Faculty and staff in Purdue University's College of Engineering have come up with a holiday gift guide that can help engage children in engineering concepts.
The "Engineering Gift Guide" was developed through the INSPIRE Institute for Pre-College Engineering, a part of the School of Engineering Education.
It features toys, games, books, movies and apps for mobile devices for a variety of ages. In addition to the selected items, the guide includes suggestions on finding other engineering-themed gifts.
"It's important to introduce engineering to children at a very young age – even before they reach kindergarten," says Monica Cardella, associate professor of engineering education and INSPIRE director. "One way to achieve this is simply putting a puzzle together or playing with building blocks and talking with the child about what they want to design, what ways they can accomplish that, and who or what could use their creation.
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-gift-parents.html
http://inspire-purdue.org/parent-materials
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Monday December 01 2014, @08:26PM
My youngest one is 3 and with an older brother who he watched play with them didn't have that problem. I would think that seeing how things go together helps a lot when first starting out as my oldest one had way more problems with Legos initially than my youngest one did. They both understand how to make fairly structurally sound creations even if they aren't perfect they are good enough in most cases. The problem in my house is my wife doesn't like that the Legos are very rarely put together into their proper sets and instead exist in various states of diss-assembly and recreations. My big concern is with lost pieces since they end up everywhere and lots of the parts are small enough to be missed when picking up so are likely to get eaten by the vacuum.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone