I work in Engineering and I’ve talked with women engineers about how they got into it.
One woman, whose dad was an engineer, told me that they built dollhouses together. She encouraged me to get my kid “any toy with complicated instructions.” Next year I bought her a Kinex Ferris Wheel set and she completed that project.
We also have an arduino Make kit. And I’ve gotten her some Snap circuits kits but we haven’t had time to open it up and play with it.
It really takes a parent getting involved with these activities. Even a born engineer needs someone to help them get started with these complicated activities. I think that’s the biggest difference between boys and girls is that the boys are more likely to have a dad who associates putting together circuit boards or working on an old car with the things they did with their dad. If their parents aren’t pulling them in, then they likely have a friend who is. Girls need their dads or moms to go out and pull them into rocket making, or building model cars, or doll houses - whatever it is that interests them.
The people in our Explorer’s group here at work are amazing at working with the kids and anyone who is as kind and interested in your child as these people are should be a part of their lives whether your kid ends up being an engineer or a checkout clerk.
(The Explorers Clubs are associated with The Boy Scouts but you do not have to be a Scout to join one.)
It’s not enforced - but it’s reinforced. It likes having a two water fountains, one with a “whites-only” sign fountain but not enforcing it. Sure, you can use the other one, but you’re being told you’re doing something wrong.
My son wanted to stay home and play Angry Birds, so my 3.5-year-old daughter went with me to the hardware store to get some things. While we were there, I told her that you could make anything from the stuff in the store and she says “I want to make something!” That’s great honey, what do you want to make? “A pwincess castle!” Wow, that’ll be awesome!
She loves playing with the tools on their toy workbench, so I had better get her the things to make a princess castle sooner or later…
The cost of ignoring it is… zero. I don’t even have to round the decimals much.
Should’ve been black, originally. The dark blue shade of black that is best as night camouflage. But there were production difficulties with shading.
I have no special like nor dislike to pink, it’s just a color. Some do. I heard a story of a builder who painted his tools pink, because the other builders considered pink girly and didn’t want to be seen with pink tools. Such a simple mod prevented his tools from keeping “wandering away”. I’d do the same trick under the same conditions.
Aren’t we surrounded by information which is percolating through our filters (hmm, need some coffee), percolating through our perceptual filters subliminally all the time? The effort one, especially as a child, would have to invest in recognising cultural conditioning and then deciding to either go with it or not isn’t insubstantial.
Even adults feel the weight of peer pressure. Deciding not to go along with a cultural tradition can be a costly enterprise. The freedom of action may exist but the implementation of a compensatory mechanism against such conditioning sometimes takes a lot of willpower and awareness, neither of which are necessarily easy.
A princess castle sounds like a really fun project. That sparkly girl website had some pink LEDs - seems like a really fun way to get her into some maker stuff.
FYI, the Explorers Club membership HERE is 50/50 girl/boy.
If somebody dislikes/disapproves of anything I do, it’s their problem, not mine.
Pick your battles. Do what takes the least energy for the most gain. You have the entire spectrum of responses from full compliance overt and internalized through overt compliance but internal dissent to peaceful noncompliance to full-scale heads-on conflict. If you don’t force either end of the spectrum on the others, do whatever you wish; otherwise expect people getting annoyed by being pushed to fight in other people’s pet wars.
My favorite pick from the response spectrum is peaceful noncompliance. Don’t force others either way, just do your thing. If it is aligned with the “norms”, good. If not, good too.
They sent a gif of this in their email to me, but the web page doesn’t have it.
It’s very cool. You wave your hand over the controller and a rainbow appears!
I think you can mod the colors (pink/purple/silver/pink???).
Probably age 3 is a little young but even if you did all the actual sticking of wires in, she might dig that you made it together and she could pick out the light combination.
If her motoric skills are good enough for getting the wires into the holes, it should work. 0402 SMD chips would be certainly too much. Though some early training with a stereomicroscope could be fun for all, if it is not TOO early.
That phenomenon feeds itself though; I won’t claim to understand it, but I will assert that there’s more to it than “that’s what they like.” Gender colorization is a relatively recent phenomenon though, and it’s kind of weird to me how incredibly pervasive it is - pink for girls only started in the 1940s. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672751/how-pink-and-blue-became-gender-specific
