Not so many years ago, computer-aided design was an arcane skill, requiring programs costing thousands of dollars. Today, CAD is used widely, and the programs have gotten cheaper and easier to use.
How cheap? How about free. And how easy? How about a CAD program designed for children?
Hat tip to Tom Craver for pointing me at this website. It is a free CAD program that will let anyone design an object, see it in 3D, and calculate what needs to be purchased to build the object. Once purchased, the components are easily assembled. A wide range of robots can be built, and the robot-programming system was also designed for kids.
When you click the link, you may at first think, "This is a toy, not a real system!" But why shouldn't it be both?
It's not hard to imagine incremental evolution of this "toy" to enable stronger and more capable robots, or some other manufacturer producing a system that was designed from the ground up for building robots. There's already a robotics contest based on the current system.
So our kids are going to grow up familiar with the idea that they can design stuff on the computer in 3D and then build it quickly. By the time they graduate college, they might possibly be using molecular manufacturing to do the building.
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