4 ms·

All high school students should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before graduating.

idrios 1y ago
Congressmen should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before taking office
Workaccount2 1y ago
Factorio is just a programming game with a manufacturing texture pack. What we want is wood shop and machine shop classes.
- tantalor 1y ago
  Humbly and politely disagree. Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
  - rendaw 1y ago
    Factorio is often described as a game for software developers (i.e. it feels like you're programming when you play). Are those really the critical skills that allowed China to grow in manufacturing so quickly? I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
  - alnwlsn 1y ago
    To be able to design any manufacturable item, you have to know that a wrench is used to tighten bolts, and a screwdriver must be able to reach the screw. There are people who don't. Some of them graduated engineering school with me.
    - iancmceachern 1y ago
      Second this, I have stories...
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    If it's about supply chains and the like, Eve Online might be a better fit, it's got the factor of time, deal-making, social interaction, theft, war, blockades, undercutting, etc in there as well. like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts. Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
  - troyvit 1y ago
    I think you're both right. If the wood shop class was a class in how to run a wood shop (not just in how to run a lathe) it would be the best of both worlds.
  - korse 1y ago
    Do you work in manufacturing?
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    But we don't have a shortage of people who understand those things. You can learn them with a passive interest while hanging around with your laptop on the weekends. We have a shortage of people who understand how to actually make things in a non-copy/paste environment. There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      When I did IT in manufacturing, we outsourced most of the 'understand how to actually make things' tooling type people jobs. We didn't need them full time and could get way better experts via outsourcing than we could hire. What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
      - nebula8804 1y ago
        >You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government. This would be a big help but maybe too little too late. Maybe we just enjoyed an era of living off the backs of Chinese labor. Now with their increasing wealth, their own desire to move up the chain and their abysmal birthrates, that era is ending. India also does not have a great birthrate and other structural problems while other asian countries dont have the numbers to completely replace China. It might be that many products we enjoyed just dont make sense anymore if no other country is willing to pick up the slack or there isn't some amazing innovation in automation. Other products might survive with massive inflation. Watch how this simple bluetooth speaker is made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U Look at how many people are there to assemble the speaker at MSRP ~20-25$ per speaker. Does that make sense in a world where those folks aren't being paid the wages that they are or they don't exist anymore because they have retired?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - UncleEntity 1y ago
    We manufacture plenty of stuff in the good ol' USA, what we struggle with is manufacturing cheap things which require large labor input.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Maybe we should just skip directly to 3D printing? Wood shop probably isn’t the place to start, but there is a starting point for kids somewhere.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    No, this doesn't solve the right problem. We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs. This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      3D is heavily used in China as well for small scale manufacturing and prototyping. It is a good place to start for middle or high school kids, and is pretty accessible and rather safe
    - eastbound 1y ago
      MythBusters-types of people can only exist in a country with garages and residential suburbs. I think what most changed music and mechanics was the transition from suburbia to flatsharing in the city centers.
      - pdmccormick 1y ago
        Not to mention intact families where parents had sufficient discretionary time (i.e. jobs that paid the bills with reasonable weekly hours) and a culture of prioritizing passing down knowledge to children and creating spaces in the home for them to pursue their individual interests and talents. People are not just atomized economic units.
    - alnwlsn 1y ago
      I'm afraid we have far more basic problems than that - illiteracy in their fingers. We have people who can't use a knife or scissors, let alone a power tool. 3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
- supportengineer 1y ago
  As an 8th grader, we had multiple years of wood shop, but that was in the late 1980's.
  - bananalychee 1y ago
    Went to middle/high school in the 2000s and had not one second of home econ or shop or anything related to it, not even theoretical. The only tools I remember working with other than a pair of scissors, compass and ruler were a glue gun and a scalpel in science labs.
whoisyc 1y ago
In Factorio you throw iron ore in an electric furnace and it turns into iron plates. In reality you need coal or coke or charcoal to reduce iron to its metal form. Steelmaking is one of the largest single source of CO2 for a reason. This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Getting kids aware of and interested in a topic is an important step. I mentor a high school robotics team, not because I have an illusion that those students could skip college and walk into a robotics design job, but because it gets them exposed to mechanics, engineering, programming, experimentation, working in a team, competing against nature and other teams, etc. Ultimately, I think it helps them refine their framework for “what do I like [or dislike] doing?”
- zelias 1y ago
  Sounds like a good argument for Pyanodon....
beefnugs 1y ago
Thats the most dangerous thing to turn kids into. They want them dumb and barely powered drill capable.

Congressmen should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before taking office

Factorio is just a programming game with a manufacturing texture pack. What we want is wood shop and machine shop classes.

tantalor 1y ago
Humbly and politely disagree. Factorio taught me about supply chains, manufacturing bottlenecks, and tooling dependencies. These concerns don't really crop up in day-to-day programming, but they reveal a lot about why we struggle manufacturing anything in USA anymore.
- rendaw 1y ago
  Factorio is often described as a game for software developers (i.e. it feels like you're programming when you play). Are those really the critical skills that allowed China to grow in manufacturing so quickly? I'm not sure shop classes fill that need either...
- alnwlsn 1y ago
  To be able to design any manufacturable item, you have to know that a wrench is used to tighten bolts, and a screwdriver must be able to reach the screw. There are people who don't. Some of them graduated engineering school with me.
  - iancmceachern 1y ago
    Second this, I have stories...
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  If it's about supply chains and the like, Eve Online might be a better fit, it's got the factor of time, deal-making, social interaction, theft, war, blockades, undercutting, etc in there as well. like, I can see a high school class set up their corporation, get mining set up, maybe own a station, get production running... but then a nullsec alliance is like haha fuck you and completely undercuts them, or the recurring player event where they block / destroy anything coming into or out of the main trade hub starts. Factorio is pretty predictable... or maybe I've played it too often so I know what to consider for the long term. I should get some mods or change some settings to create calamities like in the old Sim City.
- troyvit 1y ago
  I think you're both right. If the wood shop class was a class in how to run a wood shop (not just in how to run a lathe) it would be the best of both worlds.
- korse 1y ago
  Do you work in manufacturing?
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  But we don't have a shortage of people who understand those things. You can learn them with a passive interest while hanging around with your laptop on the weekends. We have a shortage of people who understand how to actually make things in a non-copy/paste environment. There are so many ways that mother nature says "fuck you, fuck your work" that you never get contact with in virtual environments. In fact the whole point of virtual environments it to remove that brutality. We have a dramatic shortage of young people who are interested in learning how to wrangle with mother nature OS rather than computer OS.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    When I did IT in manufacturing, we outsourced most of the 'understand how to actually make things' tooling type people jobs. We didn't need them full time and could get way better experts via outsourcing than we could hire. What we needed were wage slaves paid low enough to make the economics work, even in our small town without many employers that was the tricky bit. Especially every year when health insurance premiums went up. You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government.
    - nebula8804 1y ago
      >You want to help American manufacturing, move healthcare costs off their back and to the government. This would be a big help but maybe too little too late. Maybe we just enjoyed an era of living off the backs of Chinese labor. Now with their increasing wealth, their own desire to move up the chain and their abysmal birthrates, that era is ending. India also does not have a great birthrate and other structural problems while other asian countries dont have the numbers to completely replace China. It might be that many products we enjoyed just dont make sense anymore if no other country is willing to pick up the slack or there isn't some amazing innovation in automation. Other products might survive with massive inflation. Watch how this simple bluetooth speaker is made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFYxSX6xP2U Look at how many people are there to assemble the speaker at MSRP ~20-25$ per speaker. Does that make sense in a world where those folks aren't being paid the wages that they are or they don't exist anymore because they have retired?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- UncleEntity 1y ago
  We manufacture plenty of stuff in the good ol' USA, what we struggle with is manufacturing cheap things which require large labor input.
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Maybe we should just skip directly to 3D printing? Wood shop probably isn’t the place to start, but there is a starting point for kids somewhere.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- iancmceachern 1y ago
  No, this doesn't solve the right problem. We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs. This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    3D is heavily used in China as well for small scale manufacturing and prototyping. It is a good place to start for middle or high school kids, and is pretty accessible and rather safe
  - eastbound 1y ago
    MythBusters-types of people can only exist in a country with garages and residential suburbs. I think what most changed music and mechanics was the transition from suburbia to flatsharing in the city centers.
    - pdmccormick 1y ago
      Not to mention intact families where parents had sufficient discretionary time (i.e. jobs that paid the bills with reasonable weekly hours) and a culture of prioritizing passing down knowledge to children and creating spaces in the home for them to pursue their individual interests and talents. People are not just atomized economic units.
  - alnwlsn 1y ago
    I'm afraid we have far more basic problems than that - illiteracy in their fingers. We have people who can't use a knife or scissors, let alone a power tool. 3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
supportengineer 1y ago
As an 8th grader, we had multiple years of wood shop, but that was in the late 1980's.
- bananalychee 1y ago
  Went to middle/high school in the 2000s and had not one second of home econ or shop or anything related to it, not even theoretical. The only tools I remember working with other than a pair of scissors, compass and ruler were a glue gun and a scalpel in science labs.

whoisyc 1y ago

In Factorio you throw iron ore in an electric furnace and it turns into iron plates. In reality you need coal or coke or charcoal to reduce iron to its metal form. Steelmaking is one of the largest single source of CO2 for a reason. This is just one example among many. The truth is every single facet of industrial production is incredibly complex and there does not exist a single video game that captures all the nuance. Period. Factorio abstracted away all the boring details of industrial production and that is why it is good entertainment. But it’s still just entertainment. To think someone would become knowledge about industrial production because he played Factorio is like thinking someone is a good driver because he played Mario Kart.

sokoloff 1y ago
Getting kids aware of and interested in a topic is an important step. I mentor a high school robotics team, not because I have an illusion that those students could skip college and walk into a robotics design job, but because it gets them exposed to mechanics, engineering, programming, experimentation, working in a team, competing against nature and other teams, etc. Ultimately, I think it helps them refine their framework for “what do I like [or dislike] doing?”
zelias 1y ago
Sounds like a good argument for Pyanodon....

beefnugs 1y ago

Thats the most dangerous thing to turn kids into. They want them dumb and barely powered drill capable.