First post here on the forum… and hopefully not the last.
Just like to get people’s opinion on errors in instruction manuals? Recently I picked up a few HexBug Vex kits and noticed that they had instruction correction printouts included in some of them. On one review site, someone posted a negative review because the instructions had errors. Which reminds me of something I heard about the really old Meccano sets. They would have one or two images of the final build and include only written assembly instructions. Which intentionally included errors, to see if the person building the kit was thinking about what they were doing.
Interesting; some people gripe about errors in instructional manuals, while others intentionally included them. Personally I don’t mind some errors; find them on occasion annoying, but a great learning experience nevertheless. What is your take on this?
Errors get in. Everywhere around technology. Either you want (your kids) to mindlessly follow the instructions, or you’re aiming for the MasterBuilder rank. Having the instructions at all means that most teams on my school wasted a month building a ClawBot. Some of them learnt the purpose of the pieces from that exercise and ventured quickly into more advanced designs. Some of them have hard times breaking free from the ClawBot spell, as if doing it your way was a kind of heresy…
Perhaps starting with the picture only would force them to think of the pieces earlier, but I am still glad the full instructions are available, as thanks to them, I could have “sold” the program to the prospective team mentors as: “you’ll just watch them, they’d know what to do”.
I’m a stickler for correct instructions, and I don’t believe in intentional errors unless specifically indicated in a teacher manual as part of a task. On the other hand, I also use images of partial constructions without instructions as a specific reverse-engineering task for my students
