CAREER FOCUS
ENGINEERS’ FAVORITE BRICK
There is a myriad of reasons why future and current engineers alike enjoy spending time with LEGOs, which help develop key engineering skills and even serve a purpose in the PE’s toolkit.
Written by Robin L. Flanigan
MECHANICAL ENGINEER ABE ALMARAZ WAS 10 YEARS OLD when he was first given a big bucket of colorful LEGOs and a baseplate. After noticing his skill at constructing buildings and other structures, his relatives added to his collection—sets ranging from an F1-8157 race car model, a speed boat, and a rocket ship station, all featuring at least 500 pieces.
“This increased my interest in how things around us work, how they are put together, and the problems faced when assembling them,” recalled Almaraz, a graduate mechanical designer in the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing practice at infrastructure consulting firm Halff in San Antonio.
But LEGOs weren’t just a part of his childhood. Almaraz used LEGOs at age 24 as part of a research project to understand gravitational energy and how it could be harnessed. He also recently used LEGO SPIKE—a STEAM learning tool aimed at middle schoolers that combines LEGOs, hardware, and coding—in a robotics class to learn how to code and make a robot function correctly.
Mechanical engineers often have a sweet spot for LEGOs. It’s no secret that these plastic bricks, aside from fostering imagination and creativity, help develop spatial reasoning, structural integrity, design, and other fundamental skills essential to the engineering field.
Articles posted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Engineering, Smithsonian Magazine, and others have discussed the ways in which these simple bricks teach concepts such as structural integrity and building to scale.
The Euler-Franeker Memorial University Institute, based in the Netherlands, even has a webpage explaining how LEGOs can be used to train future engineers.
They’re a solid professional tool as well. Don Meves, a senior mechanical engineer at Priority Designs, a product development and innovation firm in Whitehall, Ohio, has used LEGOs for prototyping and to build boxes for silicone molding.
“As an adult engineer, it’s enjoyable to create something—to see what you’ve made and be like ‘It works! This is great!’—and you get the same kind of thrills from LEGOs,” said Meves, who once spent weeks building a two-foot-tall Christmas tree out of 1,444 plastic bricks.
Don Meves, senior mechanical engineer at Priority Designs.
Meves spent weeks building a two-foot-tall LEGO Christmas tree. Featuring 1,444 bricks, the tree even has a dead branch on the back for a realistic touch.
Credit: Don Meves
Meves appreciates that LEGOs come in so many different color schemes and can be put together quickly without any special tools.
“It’s always fun to take something and then model it in LEGO bricks to make it look like that thing,” he said.
For many MEs, childhood memories of the lessons they learned from the iconic building blocks are just as clear as their last work project.
Evan Kawamura was 10 when he received a LEGO Star Wars AT-AT set for Christmas. The “massive” set, which came with more than 1,000 pieces, turned out to be a great teacher during his journey to become a mechanical engineer—in large part thanks to a mistake.
Kawamura, a computer, guidance, navigation and control engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, remembers trying to put the set together too quickly. After nearly two hours of work, he realized that he had to dismantle a section of the project and start over. It was a “painful but valuable lesson” about “the importance of careful planning and execution in the early stages” of a project, he said.
That experience stuck with Kawamura and serves as a reminder of how to avoid potentially costly consequences in the real world.
“When we don’t have the instructions or blueprints and have to design something, we have to create the instructions or blueprints ourselves,” he explained. “It’s always a much harder process to design something from scratch, but it’s really cool when we see the final car, spaceship, building, etc.”
Another life lesson came during Kawamura’s elementary school years. While at a toy store with his mother, he went to purchase a 900-piece LEGO Star Wars Republic Gunship set—he’d brought along $90 in savings—but decided to put it back in order to buy several smaller Bionicle LEGO sets instead. He thought more was better. Buyer’s remorse hit about a week later, with Kawamura wishing that he had chosen quality over quantity.
“In engineering, sometimes we get tempted to do too much or think that having more features is better,” he explained. “The trade-off between quality and quantity can be difficult, but generally, high-quality products, ideas, and solutions tend to be more impactful than numerous products, ideas, and solutions at lower qualities.”
MEs who use common design programs such as Trac360, AutoCAD, Google Sketchup, and others, can think of themselves as building set designers, as they come up with easy-to-follow processes, blueprints, instructions, manuals, or solutions that other engineers can replicate, Kawamura added.
Robin L. Flanigan is an independent writer in Rochester, N.Y.
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