Peer Review

Guest post written by John

Last year, during our second week converting Ludwig into the most comfortable craggin’ waggin’ on the road, I took notice of a particularly aspiring father-son team working feverishly into each night, hard at work and obviously pressed for time. Initially unrelated, I also kept noticing two younger lads hard at work on their laptops, just outside TechShop’s doors. Sometimes they’d come inside, but mostly they stayed in the break room, right next to the popcorn machine.

A couple days later, the dad and I found ourselves taking a break in about the same area at about the same time, so I casually asked him what ‘he’ was working on. “I don’t know, I’m doing what my son tells me to do.” I inspected their project and was immediately impressed. Reagan, as it turned out, was a highly motivated 13 year old with a rather impressive resume, replete with 3D software design experience, a solid mechanical engineering foundation, and social interaction skills well beyond most engineers my age. We hit it off immediately, geeking out as we shared our experiences.

They quickly brought me up to speed on their project and timeline crunch: Reagan was announcing his latest product at Maker Faire in a few days time, but was having problems manufacturing his latest prototype to show off at said event. I’ll leave the technical details aside, but after spending a few hours over a few days working with Reagan, I will personally vouch for Reagan’s passionate work ethic and content mastery, which exceeds many engineers I’ve worked with. Did I mention he was 13? Impressively, this wasn’t Reagan’s first rodeo in the spotlight, nor do I suspect it’s his last:
Interview with a Maker: Reagan
Enterprising Home-Schooler Takes on the World of Making

It turns out TechShop’s minimum age requirement barred Reagan’s two younger brothers – the ones in the break room – from entering the workshop. Some of the staff members would let them ‘sneak’ in, but most of the time they stayed outside. I had assumed they were aimlessly consuming pointless content (youtube, facebook, etc), but it turns out they, too, were hard at work creating: they showed me 3D models and drawings they had designed and animated, including wireframe dinosaurs with skinned overlays that looked like scenes from Jurassic Park, which came out 20+ years before they were even born… in short, all three sons are performing well beyond their peers, using professional tools better than many engineers I’ve worked with.

So why do I bring this up a year after it happened? On our way through Arizona last week, Lauren and I met up with Michael, Reagan, Carson, Keane and Debbie at their home in North Phoenix. Over the past year, Reagan and I have kept in touch via email, mainly to discuss design details regarding the SLS 3D printer he’s designing. I’ve been reviewing his design for several months now, but it was great to sit together and brainstorm design elements as peers for a couple hours. Every once and a while, I’d mention an advanced mathematical concept he hadn’t learned yet (e.g. “I don’t really know the arc angle equations because I haven’t taken optical physics yet”), but otherwise – except when I glanced up to make eye contact – I forgot I was talking to someone who can’t legally drive yet. When I was 14, I had pie-in-the-sky engineering ideas, but couldn’t possibly have converted them into tangible, concrete products, as Reagan has with his present (and past) designs. I can’t imagine Reagan’s accomplishments by age 20. His brothers have an equally impressive head start and will likely all end up as senior designers doing whatever they want wherever they want.