Duplicating ducks

About two weeks ago I had taken my daughter to a friend’s house for a dinner party. ¹ She played with some kind of little board game with plastic ducks that you fish out of a moving pond.  On the way back home she asked about that game.

The best, the part that made me proud, was that she asked me about how she and I could print ducks so we could have a version of this game for ourselves.  We discussed how I have red and yellow plastic, but not orange.² How we would have to design the duck, print the duck in yellow, and then paint it with orange for the beak and legs.

I love that my daughter was thinking more about how something was constructed, how we could replicate or create a version of it, and about the material problems we would have to work around in order to create a toy for her.  Arguably, she is really thinking about how to copy existing products rather than designing or inventing.   However, I learned how to draw by copying art from comic books and how to write HTML by taking apart web pages and modifying them.

She could just as easily have asked me to buy the game for her or asked for it as a birthday or Christmas present.  I would much rather she began thinking like an inventor or designer than merely a consumer.

How has your MakerBot changed how your kid sees toys?

1. Photo courtesy of Man & Machine [↩]
2. Yet… [↩]