I don’t know how many reading this are familiar with this product often referred to as the modern day Meccano Set. But I’m sure some, probably just the boys, will remember constructing towers, bridges, cranes and other miniature marvels using the tiny girders and nuts and bolts that made up a Meccano Set, hugely popular in the early part of the last century.
So what’s this got to do with computers? Well, it seems that creating things with Lego blocks is not the exclusive pastime of children since it has recently come to light that adults, many of them possessing postgraduate diplomas in various branches of science and engineering, also spend a lot of time with Lego blocks.
My eight-year-old grandson has yet to earn a degree in anything, but he is a whiz at building all manner of things with the hundreds of Lego blocks and plans that litter his bedroom. He’s not quite there yet, but there are now kits for building miniature bots (robots for the uncool) out of Lego that move arms, legs and head(s) energized by small batteries and tiny electric motors.
I can’t wait until his curiousity draws him into this field, particularly now that Lego-minded researchers at MIT, Harvard, University of Toronto and other institutions have developed a programming language for writing software to control Lego bots. They call it “SCRATCH” created out of a need for a simple tool to control prototype bots quickly and easily before implementing design and engineering concepts in full size bots (not made out of Lego blocks). They claim that SCRATCH is so easy to learn that three and four-year-olds already proficient with Lego can be creating control programs for their little bots in no time. What a way to turn kids on to computer programming, definitely a sunrise skill for which there is a steadily increasing demand.
The Vernon PC Users’ Club meets the second Tuesday of the month at 7 p.m. at the Schubert Center in the cafeteria.For more information, call Betty at 542-7024, Olive at 542-8490 or go to www.vpcuc.org
