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A Christmas Story Uh oh…
I looked to see what else was on the table. Exploring The Human
As most of you probably did, I spent significant time this past Body, My First Nuclear Reactor, Jennie’s Launch Your Own
December shopping for Christmas presents for the family. I have Satellite kit, Time Travel in a Box, etc, etc. WTF, I thought, as I
grandkids, and one is a five-year-old boy. What the heck do you started reaching a Lewis Black, Sam Kinison level of indignation.
get for a five-year-old boy with a microscopic attention span and
a nuclear submarine’s worth of energy? I still haven’t figured it Where…are…the…SURVEYING…TOYS??? You know what I’m
out. We looked at bikes, scooters, various sporting goods, books, talking about:
blocks, trucks, and lots of things that hurl projectiles, without • Little Sammy Surveyor’s First Subdivision Plat
finding the one thing that said, “I’m the one, he’ll love me.”
• Timmy’s first Township – Cadastral Kit
So, driving from place to place, Laurie and I found ourselves in an • Tommy Topo’s Map That Mountain game
‘educational’ toy store the week before the big day. It was one
of those dimly lit, overcrowded stores full of books with morals, • Gaps and Overlaps – the Surveyor’s Game of Chance
games with social consciousness, and the erector sets of the
gods. Everything in there was designed to make a child think. • Geoffrey’s Geodesy Game- (Satellites not included)
I’m all for thinking, don’t get me wrong. I do a lot of that sort
of thing, (for all the good it does me) and I’m loath to say that • Mapping Masquerade where the players have to deduce
thinking is not always the best option for a child. But sometimes which one of them is actually an engineer
a kid just wants to get his or her ya-yas out without pondering
the greater meaning of the activity. Still, here we were at Nerdy I couldn’t find these anywhere, or anything like them. I looked,
Norm’s Purposeful Play House, looking for something to hold the as first methodically then more frantically. There has to be
something in here, I told myself.
But in the end, nothing. The clerk
asked me what do surveyors do.
Laurie had to drag me out of the
store, still ranting.
Our profession, home for so
many wonderful adult toys, like
lasers, drones, satellite receivers,
computer mapping that is almost
game-like, has absolutely nothing
for the little tykes. So, I come
away from this experience with
a resolution – let’s start with a
Surveying-themed board game.
I’m looking for suggestions and
volunteers to help work out the
layout, the art work, the wonder
of it all. Once we develop a board
game, maybe we can build a
bathtub bathymetry kit, then a
low-cost LiDAR attachment for
our kids’ drones. A cadd plug in for
the Etch a Sketch perhaps. Once
we get started, who know where
it could stop? Yeah, we need to do
it because we have to find a way
attention of Captain Fidget, our rambunctious grandbaby. I had to recruit youth into our ranks, but really we should want to do it
to look around. because, hey, it’s fun, right? Why else are we surveyors? It’s not
for the money…
Being left-handed, I gravitated to the right side of the store,
as though that meant anything, and there on a display table I And all this from a guy who views the Get Kids Into Surveying
spied two medium sized boxes, one with photographs of happy campaign with a jaundiced eye. Who’da thunk it?
children, wearing white lab coats, and the other with blocks and
gears and levers, made into a crane, plastered across the top. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas!
One was called Kids First Intro to Engineering and the other was
Kids First Engineering Design. -CRC

16 The Nevada Traverse Vol.49, No.1, 2022