Kickoff ..
Best time to plant a tree is 20 years or ago, next best is today.
This is the home to hammering out ideas for the primary substack - Patterns of Design. It’s a great place to run down some topics deeper - directors cut and less production effort.
Why this theme - Patterns of Design? Inspiring young students to carefully observe the world around them, to learn how things work, why they were built that way, to reason about them when they don't, sometimes to see what might be improved. And to learn the engineer’s trade-off triangle:
I ran across many engineering and building projects from the earliest days. The first decade was mostly in Boston and the Museum of Science was almost a weekly trip, as was the green line trolley for those that know that treat. This I leader often did be come clear for a decade or more. It was the gift of being passed riddles that challenge minds for hundreds of years. Some riddles were audaciously yet to be solved. I learned to live with riddles like these.
Now I get to share some of that with students in the K-12 space. It’s a refreshing decade of refocusing after 29 years at National Instruments working on LabVIEW and LEGO Mindstorms with a wonderful team.
That’s enough for a kickoff. A film crew visited my class in 2024. There is a great overview just about 7.5 minutes into the video below
