By ten, he had decided that he wanted to be an engineer in charge of building a dam or a power plant.
Once students registered their predictions, one of them was nominated as the engineer in charge of building the road and asked to simulate the construction by placing the rectangular cloth on top of the square one.
IHS regularly makes a point of trying to backwards engineer the cost of building a brand-new Apple device by tearing them down and looking at what goes into one.
The series, called Circuit Playground, takes an alphabetical approach to teaching kids about the basics of circuits, components and concepts that will come in handy if the tots watching have aspirations of becoming electrical engineers, or just of building their own hobby projects at home.
Wang, who retired in 2004 as Singapore's director general of public health, happened to be the Ministry of the Environment engineer put in charge of building the original hawker centers, in the seventies.
From the beginning, the approach was rooted less in the biologist's methods of patient observation than in the engineer's childlike love of building cool stuff and hyperrational expectations about the way things ought to work.
Last week I reported about Facebook assembling a team of experienced engineers with the hopes of building a Facebook smartphone.
For all these reasons, then, engineers have long dreamed of building chips out of something cheaper and more bendy plastic, say.
Engineers have long dreamed of building rockets that could be used more than once, but their only serious attempt so far - America's semi-reusable Space Shuttle - turned out to be expensive and unreliable.
Next on the roadmap was a mobile app, but the engineers had become wary of building another product few people might use.
