There was a technical design/drafting book in his book case I picked up where I was around ~6 or so...
I drew every single diagram/ortho/iso whatever in that book. Multiple times.
When I got into middle school, I was opted to elect a highschool class, and I chose technical drafting...
When I went to class, the textbook was the same one from my grandfathers bookcase - I sailed through that, and then...
This was what got me into design and architecture and CAD... I then setup the first cad network in my highschool, while I was still in 7th grade.
I was in VOCAD by 9th, and came in second in the CAD Olympics in 1993 (I was the fastest ever to finish the test in 30 minutes, on a 3 hour deadline.)
THE ENTIRE POINT BEING ;
Get kids in front of technical design/docs/whatever is complex as EARLY as possible.
There is no loss in teaching a toddler calculus. They may wind up being a flamboyant broadway star, but at least they can maths.
What fun is it to be a broadway star when you know maths?
Sounds like it could be fun.
I'm convinced the old-style ones were the reason I buried the needle the one time I was given a cognitive test that specifically tested spatial reasoning. The old sets' instructions were basically 3d spot-the-difference puzzles, in which orientation might even change between states, so they were pretty much training for that kind of test.
The new ones have a little of that, but a lot more arrows pointing things out, little insets highlighting important parts, et c. Plus they put the pieces in numbered bags so you don't have them all out at once, for medium-sized or larger sets! Much, much easier than they used to be.
Flip side is the old ones used larger pieces, on average. The modern sets are all fiddly, tiny bricks, which does make them a little harder to assemble (and much harder—nearly impossible—to repair from memory if they're damaged during play)
Maybe I’m older and my color vision isn’t as good as it used to be, but damn it’s frustrating.
Yah, there's a lot of criticism of the "directions".
My kids build big elaborate modular buildings from the directions... and then leave them as-is...
And then try to build equivalently complicated things from loose bricks (sometimes copying a little bit of a mechanism or a trick they've seen elsewhere).
I think the instructions are great. They just shouldn't be the be-all, end-all.