This is fantastic. Reminds me of the better part of a morning I spent at the beginning of the summer at the Boston Science Museum, where, in a dark, neglected corner of the basement, they have a very old display with motorized versions of many of these mechanisms. I think I was the only person there the whole time.
There's a lot of buzz about "learn-to-code" movements, but people are generally just as illiterate about mechanics, electronics, and other basic science. I think we may have covered 5% of these mechanisms in one unit of my HS freshman science class.
We do a terrible job teaching science in the US...
Sure, our curriculum doesn't cover each of these mechanics. But they do cover the basic properties of levers, pendulums, pulleys, gears, cams, chains/belts, levers, etc. Every single one of these mechanisms is a recombination of those ideas. I would argue that for fields that don't actually require designing or building mechanical objects, an understanding of what the primitives are is enough.
The analogous features in computer science would be things like functions, values, loops, etc, that it's certainly possible to understand without being a good programmer. You can know (at a high level) what sausage is made of, without actually being a sausage-maker.
Maybe I just had some substandard science curriculum. We got pretty much the 10000, or 100000 foot view of most topics.
I think the bigger problem is that US education is so overwhelmingly aligned with teaching to what is on the SAT. There are a hundred basic life skills that are scandalously neglected in favor of pushing everybody up to calculus (ignoring a lot of the geometry and trig that is useful to know if you end up working in trades) and finely tuning our abilities to churn out five paragraph SAT essays. Shop and Home-ec classes have been slashed. Everybody should be able to bake a cake, hem a pair of pants, balance a checkbook, change their oil, replace a lawn-mower belt, understand a loan agreement or lease, hang a shelf, etc.
There's a lot of buzz about "learn-to-code" movements, but people are generally just as illiterate about mechanics, electronics, and other basic science. I think we may have covered 5% of these mechanisms in one unit of my HS freshman science class.
We do a terrible job teaching science in the US...