Doc wrote:
"Ed Huntress" wrote in
:

The mechanisms in the book were great for teaching manufacturing and
the finished mechanisms, they were taken by teachers to use as
teaching aids.


Doc
Your experience probably agrees with that I've heard from many
teachers, that a physical example of what's being taught is a
tremendous help both in explaining the lesson, and, even more
importantly, cementing it in the students' memories. That's why I've
built demonstration pieces for several of my son's classes when he was
in school. The tin-can electric motor was a particular winner.

It's also a probable reason that physics was my best subject in high
school, and why I remember so much of it. We built equipment to
demonstrate practically everything. I even built a ruby-rod laser that
was pumped with a No. 25 photographic flash bulb in an elliptical
reflector.


Absolutely, I am convinced that a lot of machinists are tactile learners
and cannot count the number of times that students have told me, "I learn
best when I can have the real thing to figure out as opposed to reading the
manual". My guess is that a lot of the people in this group are of that
ilk.

I'd go much further than that.

I know of no one who learns better from text than from doing it themselves,
particularly with the guidance of an expert. Machining, electronics, math,
needlepoint ... the subject does not seem to matter a bit.

Personally, I'm almost hopeless in learning from plain text. There are just
too many ways to phrase a concept in an opaque manner.

Simple example: In my machining class, the instructor showed how to quickly
(and easily) open and close a "C" clamp by hanging on to the handle and
swinging the body of the clamp radially about the screw thread. By physical
example, we all got the concept within a second or so. I guarantee that
my explanation would be perfectly useless to some and somewhat dangerous
to others simply because no two people think exactly alike (and no one
person thinks exactly the same way over the period of an hour or so.)

Sounds like a good Mythbusters episode.

--Winston