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Subject: 
Re: New Civil Engineer letter
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.technic
Date: 
Mon, 2 Jul 2001 14:41:13 GMT
Viewed: 
845 times
  
Larry Pieniazek wrote:

The man has a point. The typical construction of an inexperienced student
isn't likely to hang together very well, especially if it's built using tall
columns of basic bricks, etc. And things that don't hang together don't
demonstrate mechanical principles.

I sortof see this and sortof don't. If they are talking specifically about civil
engineering then fair enough, and I suppose the fact that you can "legally" bend
meccano parts in ways not really possible with Lego could be relevant, but one
of the reasons I always preferred Technic over Meccano (aside from the fact I
never had Meccano) was that Technic seemed to offer far more possibilities when
it came to making mechanisms and vehicles.

Why this should be I have no idea, and I certainly haven't explored Meccano to
any great extent, but things usually looked a bit clunky in it and for some
reason it seemed less flexible (in terms of what you could do) than Lego. I
could make all sorts of grotesque contraptions with huge gear trains and
whatnots far easier with Lego, and perhaps even more importantly do it more
quickly; things click and pop together rather than needing to be bolted on.

I am almost certainly biased in this (maybe my brain is just geared towards Lego
far more than Meccano), but with all of the great Technic works on the Internet,
for someone to dismiss it as being useless at demonstrating mechanics shows they
haven't done their research well enough :-)

Jennifer
http://www.telepresence.strath.ac.uk/jen/lego/



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: New Civil Engineer letter
 
(...) Because you know all the idioms. To draw an analogy, I can code in C++ or Java a lot faster than I can in Lisp, because I know more idioms and patterns. That doesn't (in and of itself) make C++ *better* than Lisp, just different. You need a (...) (23 years ago, 2-Jul-01, to lugnet.technic)
  Re: New Civil Engineer letter
 
(...) I sit firmly in the 'sort of don't' camp. I'm going to do a little more work on this tonight, particularly in terms of the ways in which Meccano models civils better than Lego (in my opinion none). (...) One of the reasons why I never liked (...) (23 years ago, 2-Jul-01, to lugnet.technic, lugnet.loc.uk)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: New Civil Engineer letter
 
(...) The man has a point. The typical construction of an inexperienced student isn't likely to hang together very well, especially if it's built using tall columns of basic bricks, etc. And things that don't hang together don't demonstrate (...) (23 years ago, 2-Jul-01, to lugnet.loc.uk, lugnet.mediawatch, lugnet.technic)

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