39-245
Carnegie Mellon University
Spring 2000
Matthew McGuire
Teaching Toy Concepts
Description:
This exercise was posed to the class as a purely conceptual one. Three toy concepts were to be developed which were able to teach a fundamental concept of physics to a child. The class was to provide a hand drawn sketch as well as a description of the operation of the toy. As far as constraints were involved there were very few in this case. There wasn't any age range and since the toy was only drawn on paper there was the possibility of anything being created. The only discouragement was to keep from directly copying an existing toy, although variations or additions on old concepts could be made. The following links lead to the three concepts.
What I Learned:
I learned that every toy idea that I came up with was in some way similar to toys that other people in the class had when they were kids. This is not too much of a problem, sometimes its hard to find a really new idea that someone has never had. On the other hand, it shows that I came up with ideas that have been tested and work since people actually bought the products. I felt that this exercise was also a lot of fun since engineers don't often get to ask "Will this be fun to play with?", at least if they are not designing toys.