Signs That A Child Is Going To Be An Engineer

[JoeN]

I want to create a good long list for this so I am going to contribute a few and see where this goes.

1.  The kid has, without asking permission, disassembled a large appliance just to see "how it works".  Extra points for getting it back together again.
2.  Not content with owning two "How Things Work"-type books, he has just bought a third.
3.  Without being induced by an adult, has taught himself how to program a computer with a general purpose programming language.

Here's a personal one:

4.  Not being content just to fly model rockets, has taken his sister's Barbie car, turned it into a tank by building a new shell on it, and added a two-stage Estes rocket system (two C-5-0s) to propel it down the street at about 30 miles an hour (age 10 for that I think, good times).

Please add your own personal experiences.

[brucehoult]

When I was four (1967), I disassembled large parts of Dad's brand new Masport lawn mower. I got it all back together again, except for the starter recoil spring.  Oops! (Dad managed to fix it up)

At seven (1970) I was building things with batteries, wires, lamps, switches. Figured out how to use 2 DPDT switches so that either one could turn a lamp on or off -- and then figured out how to use an arbitrary number of them. At nine (1972), over the winter season I "borrowed" all the relays from the cow milking shed control box, made good use of them, and put them back before calving in spring. I mentioned this to Dad recently -- he was shocked and said he was very glad he didn't know that then. At ten (1973) I was allowed to skip school classes and use the school caretaker's workshop to design and make a control system for flashing lights on a "flying saucer" for the school end of year play. I used a bit of broom handle, stuck drawing pins into it, joined by wires, and rigged up variable-speed reversable control for it using a Hornby model railway controller (big rheostat, possibly identical to the one below) to an electric motor, using an old alarm clock as reduction gearbox and plastic ballpoint pen ink tubes as connecting shafts (press fit over metal stub shafts). Springy metal leaves pressed against the rotating broom handle, completing the circuit to various lamps.  At about the same time I repaired my grandparents' radiogram by the simple technique of noticing that one of the tubes wasn't glowing and taking it to a shop to get one the same.

[Ampera]

Your 10 year old kid turned a barbie car into a tank and sped it down the street @30 MPH with rockets?

I'm 15, taking a Calc 2 course in college with ATM straight 100s on tests, but I think I've been beat.

[CatalinaWOW]

I don't think there are any general signs.  Can't speak for sure about Dad, the engineer, but all anyone talks about in the family about his childhood years is hunting, shooting and exploring.  I played with Erector sets and blocks, and took many things apart, put far fewer together (once I understood how they worked I wasn't interested anymore).  Both sons are engineers.  Both built things and took them apart, but it took one years to learn that solder was not as good as bailing wire for holding things together, and the other was more interested in band than anything mechanical.

I was a Boy Scout leader for years, and watched several boys grow up to be engineers.  Some showed the signs, but others showed no interest what so ever in technical or mechanical things until they reached their college years.

[Brumby]

[onlooker]

I'm 15, taking a Calc 2 course in college with ATM straight 100s on tests, but I think I've been beat.

Good for you, but what is "ATM"? Something like Mathcounts or AMC8/10/12? I guess you should be ranking well in Mathcounts or AMC. 

[Ampera]

It means at the moment.

[raspberrypi]

It means at the moment.

Auvtomat Tellurium manufacturer.

[gnif]

It means at the moment.

Auvtomat Tellurium manufacturer.

Automated Teller Machine

[noidea]

The force is strong with this one....
14 months old and one of her favourite toys is my multimeter! :-0

[Smokey]

1.  The kid has, without asking permission, disassembled a large appliance just to see "how it works".  Extra points for getting it back together again.
2.  Not content with owning two "How Things Work"-type books, he has just bought a third.
3.  Without being induced by an adult, has taught himself how to program a computer with a general purpose programming language.
4.  Not being content just to fly model rockets, has taken his sister's Barbie car, turned it into a tank by building a new shell on it, and added a two-stage Estes rocket system (two C-5-0s) to propel it down the street at about 30 miles an hour (age 10 for that I think, good times).

Pretty much spot on...
1) Yup ... I'm still amazed everything included all those "Extra" parts through....
2) Yup ... All of the "Big book of tell me why" series...
3) Yup ... VB6 counts... but just barely...
4) Yup ... It was my own remote control car... the one with the built in nerf launcher that I re-purposed to ignite the engine... It didn't work very well through... nowhere near 30mph.... even after tripling the engines.

[Red Squirrel]

As a kid, a question I would often ask myself about a toy or object is "I wonder how much volts this can take".    My mom probably wondered why I always asked for 9 volt batteries when I saw them at the check out at a store, because none of my toys took those.   Oh, they took them.   

[LaserSteve]

Boy Scout Jamboree is held at local arsenal that produces mortars and other neat things for the Army.  At the tank exercise bivouac, complete with recent tread marks and mud. MY patrol decides that its two demos will be Model Rocketry and a lashed 20 foot tower, no nails.


Ten or so Army ordinance officers are walking up the muddy hill to the field in pristine dress uniforms, ready to judge the presentations.  Large model rocket  "Big Bertha" launches out of our site, noses over at about 50 feet and heads a half  mile down range with a  serious hissing whoosh!  It had rained for hours the night before. Hear Army shout "cover, cover" and dive left and right into deep mud... Said rocket might have just had a 14 year old's latest engine design in it... After Army is done  retreating to don cammies, guess who's troop took first place...

Home made image conversion night vision at 15, PID Loops controlling the Hene Laser scanner at 16, and the TRS-80 controlled the Christmas lights one year...

Biked fourteen miles round trip  way to the University science library in the summers, librarians noted very  quiet, way underage,  very polite student tearing through EE journals and photocopying circuits to build.  Chief Librarian arranges unheard of "Guest Card" for said kid... Tells me she'll see me there in a few years. I attend her retirement as a permanent Staff member in College of Engineering... Go figure..

A certain religious group in the US known for proselytizing door to door is visiting the house in the summer. I come upstairs in full protective  gear at age 14 or so to tell Mom to ignore the large bang  that is incoming shortly.  Leader of said group says "What a wonderful, polite, child, telling you he is about to do that." Then hastily retreats with his group at about Mach One, out the front door.   The large balloon goes up, literally, right about the time they reach the mailbox. It was not malicious, I just would not let anything get in the way of the Saturday afternoon experiment schedule. Look on their face, priceless. Those City Dwellers just were not prepared for country life. Hope God forgives me for the shock waves..


* Note for the powers that be, at "Homelab InSecurity"(tm), Energetic materials went out of my life a long time ago. Getting paid to make lab equipment, maintain lasers, help graduate students, and  to create active Nanomaterials for wound healing is a lot more fun.

Steve

[W2NAP]

As a kid, a question I would often ask myself about a toy or object is "I wonder how much volts this can take".    My mom probably wondered why I always asked for 9 volt batteries when I saw them at the check out at a store, because none of my toys took those.   Oh, they took them.   

oh man, I had one of them ride in cars as a kid about 5 or 6 years old.  (it was a chev monte painted in earnardts blue and yellow wranger colors) it took a 6v brick battery.. i changed the 6v out for 2 12v car batteries.. it worked and despite the added weight it was fast. but it was hard to control and ended up wrecked

[brucehoult]

A certain religious group in the US known for proselytizing door to door is visiting the house in the summer. I come upstairs in full protective  gear at age 14 or so to tell Mom to ignore the large bang  that is incoming shortly.  Leader of said group says "What a wonderful, polite, child, telling you he is about to do that." Then hastily retreats with his group at about Mach One, out the front door.   The large balloon goes up, literally, right about the time they reach the mailbox. It was not malicious, I just would not let anything get in the way of the Saturday afternoon experiment schedule. Look on their face, priceless. Those City Dwellers just were not prepared for country life. Hope God forgives me for the shock waves..

I don't suppose there happened to be an oxy/acetylene welder on the premises?

I made some rather large bangs in my yoof by setting a slightly oxygen flame, extinguishing it and filling a balloon or plastic bag. I set one off with a length of firecracker fuse, but after surviving that the rest were triggered with a .22 from 100m away :-) :-)  Rattled house windows 400 or 500 metres away.

[TheWelly888]

My Dad was always working on the family car when I was a kid in the 1970s. I used to "help" him!

I did learn a lot from him.

[rrinker]

My Dad was always working on the family car when I was a kid in the 1970s. I used to "help" him!

I did learn a lot from him.

 Same here. My Dad even made me a box to stand on so I could see. And I used to read all the old books he had, engine repair manuals and so forth dating back to the 50's, one was some sort of Army training manual.
 One of my favorite 'toys' was my box of lights, batteries, wires, and switches. Plus I did a lot of model train stuff. Other favorites were my Erector set and of course the huge box of Lego I had. I subscribed to Popular Electronics when I was 12, we sold magazines for a school fundraiser and I got one for myself. Prior to that I came across an old issue of Radio-Electronics at the white elephant table at some sort of school function in elementary school - it happened to feature the RCA 1801 Microtutor and the computer bug bit hard, I read that article over and over until I understood what it was talking about. SHortly thereafter the TRS-80 Model 1 came out and I became a fixture in the local Radio Shack store. The subscription to PE showed me a whole lot of other sorts of things I could do with electronics, and a guy down the street gave me a huge box full of parts and gadgets since he was moving and knew I was interested in that stuff. By the time I was 15 or so I knew I wanted to be an EE - I loved messing around with computers and I had quite a collection, but I knew computer science wasn't for me, I didn't much care for the theory and design of programming algorithms, I just had fun writing programs that did things I wanted. A visit to Bell Labs (right after the breakup - one of the presenters jokingly told us all to ignore the Bell logo on all the slides) plus an engineering day at a local university (the one I ended up attending) solidified my desire to go for EE, not CompE or CompSci. So looking back, it was pretty apparent that I was going to be an engineer. Oh yeah, in those in between years I also built a bunch of things, mostly of wood. I had a broken wagon, I made a frame of 2x4's and some plywood and bolted the wheels from the wagon to it. I took a set of old metal roller skates, and made a cross-shaped platform (one bold where the crosspiece went, this is how it was steered) with the idea to put a sail of some sort on it. I had a somewhat crappy go-kart chassis my Dad got from one of his co-workers but never got around to doing anything with - so basically a push car - that I DID erect a sale on using tent poles. If there was a decent wind in the right direction it would push me up the hill in front of my house, then I could take the sale down and coast down the hill.
 So yeah, once an engineering nerd, always an engineering nerd.

[calexanian]

I remember when that came out. Could not stop laughing. So true though. 

[technix]

When I was 4 or 5 my mom used to take me to her office. They had a HP/UX time sharing system back then - a floor sample of what they were selling - that I can play with. They decided to pull out an 286 PC and put Xenix on it so it can be used as a terminal for the HP/UX box, hooked up a null modem and man it was fun with UNIX and some X graphics on EGA. I got my first computer later but it ran Windows 95. I later got into Visual Basic when I was 7. EE came into play when I was 7 too, eager to learn why computer works.

Maybe that is why I am nostalgic when I bought my MacBook Pro: all that familiar experiences with UNIX are coming back with macOS. It is a full blown UNIX too, just like Xenix and HP/UX.

[Cerebus]

Biked fourteen miles round trip  way to the University science library in the summers, librarians noted very  quiet, way underage,  very polite student tearing through EE journals and photocopying circuits to build.  Chief Librarian arranges unheard of "Guest Card" for said kid... Tells me she'll see me there in a few years. I attend her retirement as a permanent Staff member in College of Engineering... Go figure..

Gotta love a good librarian. By the way, never cross a university librarian, they have literally thousands of books that tell them how to plot their revenge...

[jimdeane]

All applied to me.  Add in that I was called upon to 'fix' anything from lamps to VCRs.

I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up a physicist.

[rrinker]

 With the terrorist hiding under every bed mentality today, what my friend and I did when we were in high school would certainly have had us imprisoned for life.
 He was much more interested in chemistry than I was, plus his Dad owned a plastics plant, so he had access to pretty much anything he wanted. That included all sorts of oxidizers, and pure alcohol, among other things. He also got into making his own gunpowder.
 It all came down to the day of the ultimate explosive device. There was an empty lot near my house, in between two roads, the modern highway and the old road. Now there are houses there, but at the time, it was a big open area, and it was full of dirt bike trails, including some jumps other kids had made by piling up dirt. Also old tires found their way there, often used as obstacles to jump over. So one day my friend comes over and he has this device he has made. The detonator portion is a wrapped up pile of his homemade gunpowder the size of a huge cigar - I don't smoke so I'm not sure what the really big ones are called. This was suspended by the fuse in a 2 liter plastic soda bottle. What he put in the bottle I don't remember but it was a fuel of some sort plus a strong oxidizer. Being unsure of how big an explosion this would be, he used a whole roll of fuse cord. We stacked 2 or 3 old tires in the middle of a large dirt area (away from the weeds and brush the covered much of the area) and put the bottle int he middle. Stretched out the fuse cord, lit it, and took off. We were out of the lot, across the road, and a block up towards my house when it finally detonated. I have never personally witnessed something that loud since. It echoed like crazy off all the houses in my neighborhood. We just kept walking and went back to my house. What I could not believe is that no one called the police or fire department. We hung out at my house for about an hour, then decided we should go back and make sure nothing was burning. As we approached the area, it looked like a black snow had fallen. Shredded rubber. No trace of the bottle was found. Also amazed that windows weren't blown out of the houses nearest this lot, probably putting the device in the middle of the pile of tires helped there. I couldn't believe it had literally shredded the tires.

[Artlav]

1.  The kid has, without asking permission, disassembled a large appliance just to see "how it works".  Extra points for getting it back together again.

Yeah, a BORROWED appliance.
Without the "extra points" part...

[SingedFingers]

With the terrorist hiding under every bed mentality today, what my friend and I did when we were in high school would certainly have had us imprisoned for life.

Snap.  Eventually, every time there was a loud bang in the town, I was asked if it was me who was responsible. Sometimes it was. We used to steal the stuff from the chemistry department. I suspect we were allowed to get away with it as the chem teacher was a pyromaniac as well and let us pour a whole gallon of creosote on the school bonfire as a joke. Poor sod who lit it disappeared in a fireball.

When I say stole stuff, we stole fumic nitric acid, 10M HCl, caesium, large rolls magnesium tape, 100% pure ethanol etc.

My 4 year old owns a Uni-T UT33A (no probes as that's asking for trouble) and regularly goes around "testing" things with it. She can also get both traces up on any scopes regardless of how they are currently set up, which is something my fellow students at university could barely manage.

I've told my kids that they must never admit to knowing anything about computers if even they do that as a career. You are instantly everyone's best friend then, but only when they have a goat porn and crap infested death laptop from hell. Electrical engineers; no one knows what to get them to do I found in my short career as one.

[LaserSteve]

The balloons may or may not have been filled with a glassblowing torch. I wanted to work with lasers, and back then you had to make lasers if you wanted one, not buy a diode.

So with GE Lamp Research down the road, Dad, bless him, arranged for me to have some evening lessons with pyrex.

Whole goal was a home made Argon Ion laser.

The Engineers at Goodyear Aerospace saw to it, that any child, either management, or union member, had a world class Science Fair project and access to scraps.  I had pounds of mil spec Rs  and Cs, mostly 1% metal film and Tantalum. Back then there was no Internet, getting data books required a business card, and your success was directly proportional to whoever mentored you. I have to say, that taught me to read and think. Thanks Dad, Thanks GAC/Loral/Lockmart Department 584.

I pass it on. I love mentoring high school kids for Intel ISEF, and I'm a senior judge for the regional science fair. Take s few hours of your life and pass on the skill set. My work lab is open to most kids who ask, and as a College, we offer quiet summer internships for high school kids. 9 thru 12 often fair quite well in a graduate lab setting
 
One kid I mentored sent me a subtle message a while back. The goverment  powers that be called me, he was getting a security clearance. SIX years after his project, he put me down as a reference for a job at a National Lab. What a nice, suprising, way to say thanks.

I of course told them to keep an eye on the rascal, but clear him....

Steve