Toys to Turnpikes: Seeing the Engineer in Your Future

It wasn’t at all what I expected. While doing some due diligence preparation for a recent engineering assignment, I was searching the Internet for some information on the Kerner Ferry Bridge in Barataria, Louisiana. I accidentally typed in “Kenner” instead of “Kerner” and got quite a surprise. One of the first search results was an auction for a 1958 Kenner “Bridge and Turnpike Building Set.”

I probably hadn’t thought about this toy for $40\text{years}$ . When this set was made, I was about $6\text{years}$ old, and Tinker Toys^® were still my favorite toy. I don’t remember when I first saw the Kenner set, but I do remember that it was love at first sight. A few years later, when I received one of these Kenner sets as a present, I was fully into a play world of Matchbox^® cars and military miniatures, with a battalion of tanks, artillery, trucks, and jeeps in my arsenal. The Kenner set would fit in beautifully, as it was made to produce bridges and roads at the same scale.

The key components of the set were a reasonably accurate set of structural members. There were plastic I-beams and columns—colored red to look like primed steel—that hooked together to build replicas of steel frames. There were braces that could be added diagonally for support. There were green masonite squares that provided foundations for the columns in a square pattern that matched the span of the miniature beams. And there were gray roadway sections that were made of a very thin plastic. Some were squares, identical in size to the foundation pieces, while others were longer sections that were straight or curved, complete with yellow centerline striping, dashed or solid respectively. Together, the system could be used to build a surprising variety of bridges and roadways, including a rudimentary cloverleaf interchange.

As I built structures and then tore them down again, the inhabitants of my play world were exposed to a constantly changing infrastructure, which seems to be not all that different from what many of us experience today in urban environments. They didn’t seem to mind, although they may have been a little wary of the ever-present military vehicles. LEGO^® people of later years would be able to relate to my “nation-building” efforts, but, in the 1960s, my inhabitants probably suspected that the real reason for the military presence was the threat of a communist insurgency.

I also remember that I flat wore the thing out. Though well made, the connections between the beams and columns consisted of little tabs on the former that matched up with little slots on the latter. The tabs eventually wore out and broke off. They were evidently intended for normal children who would get bored after building a few bridges, not budding engineers who would assemble and disassemble the connections hundreds of times.

Looking at the set’s instructions, reproduced in full color on the auction site, I saw a few things that intrigued me some 40-plus years later. First of all, whoever prepared them must have been an engineer. Who else would write, “It’s fun to be a bridge engineer and build SUSPENSION, CANTILEVER, AND DRAW BRIDGES like these”?

The concise instructions used realistic terms like spans and approaches and even addressed what today we would call “construction sequencing” in a manner that approximates the considerations real engineers make for real projects. I do have two criticisms. The instructions describe how the deck of the arch suspension bridge would need to be supported temporarily, perhaps by books, until the arch is finished. It would have been nice if they had called the books “falsework,” but I guess there’s only so much jargon you can use when writing for $10\text{-year}$ -olds. In addition, I can see how the deck could be built without the temporary support. Who says $30\text{years}$ in the profession doesn’t pay off?

Second, the instructions show a respect for the reader. They didn’t use childlike phrasing or assume that the reader didn’t have a brain in his or her head. Just using the word cantilever and not explaining it shows you have some expectations for the reader. And take, for example, the instructions for the arch suspension bridge. Step 1: “Build the end piers and approaches complete.” Did I as a preadolescent teen know what an end pier or a bridge approach was? The instructions didn’t pander to me. “Hey kid, here’s the job. If you don’t understand, go ask somebody, or better yet, use your head and just figure it out for yourself.” And I did.

I wonder if these sets are made today. Obviously, they would have to be brought up to date. There would need to be bike lanes along the edges of the roadways so that we could serve modes of travel other than motorized vehicles. Sidewalks would need to be provided for pedestrians and wheelchair ramps for disabled users. Plastic replicas of miniature detention ponds and artificial wetlands would be needed to offset the miniature environmental impacts of building the miniature bridges and turnpikes.

As my son grew up, we spent hundreds of hours playing with LEGO building sets. These sets are a marvel of toy design, from which you can almost literally build anything from a small car to an accurate replica of the space shuttle or Mount Rushmore. The instructions are brilliant, a wisely crafted tribute to our modern, global world. Without a single word, they provide complete direction for assembly of an object with many hundreds of pieces. They’re accessible to speakers of any language and even to those who can neither read nor write.

But for some reason, it wasn’t the same as playing with the Kenner set. Sure, some of this was just nostalgia on my part. But I also felt that my son didn’t get as much out of playing with the LEGO set as I did with its building set counterpart decades earlier. I doubt he’ll look back some day and say, “Ah, now I see—that was a step on the road to becoming [as it turns out] an economist, because …”

I think the disparity may lie with the different degrees of abstraction represented by the two toys. The flexibility to build anything out of LEGO pieces is both a benefit and a curse. A single piece can be anything, from the bumper on a car to the wing of the space shuttle to a piece of George Washington’s right ear lobe. So just what is an individual piece? It seems that an individual piece relates to the real world on an almost atomic level—without knowing what it’s a part of, you know little about it. It’s just a building block, by itself giving you no clue what to do with it other than connect it to other building blocks.

In contrast, the Kenner set related easily to the real world. The pieces couldn’t be just anything; beams were beams, columns were columns, roadways were roadways, and so forth. The way the system related to my Matchbox and military vehicles strengthened this connection to reality. It all fit together and, together, it all fit with my developing vision of the world around me. When I built bridges and highways, something deep within me must have been realizing, “Yes, I can do this.” And “this” related to doing things in the real world, not just in the safe confines of my bedroom.

So was the Kenner Bridge and Turnpike Building Set important in my development as a civil engineer? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that it played a transitional role in bridging the gap between the abstract world of Tinker Toys and the possibility of building real things in the real world. It can be a scary thought as a child, even as a young high school or college graduate, that there isn’t really something out there for you in the adult working world. With its simplified realism, I think the Kenner set nudged me along the path from play to work, pointing the way forward. I was on the right path; there was a future profession out there building things, and I was heading toward it.

When we educate engineers today, how do we instill in them the same confidence that they will be able to apply what they’ve learned, not just in the classroom, but out there in the real world? As I approached the end of my undergraduate studies, I can remember doubting that I was, in fact, on the right path, in spite of my building set experience. In spite of my formal engineering education, certainly a state-of-the-art program in the 1970s, I was still not confident that civil engineering was the path for me. Luckily, the Army had plans for the next 4 or 5 years of my life, during which my responsibilities in combat and construction engineering units restored my belief that I was heading in the right professional direction.

Internships are one way of doing this and may be available to some, as they were to my peers decades ago. For many of today’s engineering students, realistic computer simulations may help show them that they’re on the right track. My daughter’s high school petroleum engineering academy students recently participated in a robust oilfield development simulation; my son took part in the same $2\text{-day}$ long exercise while earning his economics degree. It amazed me to learn how the players—some only freshmen and sophomores in high school—became totally immersed in a very realistic game of evaluating and then bidding on potential oil leases, forming partnerships to expand their chances of striking oil, taking steps to mitigate their risks, and arranging for drilling assets. Such simulations, the virtual equivalents of my old building set, are already finding their way into our engineering classrooms.

However, only time will tell if these simulations will go beyond being an instructional tool and reinforce our students’ assurance that a future in engineering is right for them. By the time they reach our classrooms, today’s students will already have built cities and civilizations, sailed and explored with Columbus and Cortez, fought hand-to-hand in every conceivable conflict scenario, and even lived as avatars in strange, distant worlds—all via computer simulations. It might be asking too much that engineering simulations will help the participants see themselves as engineers in the real world; after all, we certainly hope that they don’t really think they will someday walk the forests of Pandora as $10\text{-foot}$ -tall blue humanoids.

Just in case, it may be a good time to see how many of the Kenner sets we can find on eBay.