I have a “friend”, at least in the sense that he is on my friend list on Facebook. I will call him, “Eric”, since that is his name. He is a musician.

The other day, “Eric” posted on FB that he was in the car on a trip with his kids and they were playing DJ with the songs being played on the radio. What do you expect? Music is his life. And I am guessing that the kids were mildly amused.

However, I am here to report that engineers can be great fun for kids while riding in the car, too.  Just like people such as “Eric”, an engineer will use his skills to fascinate the children. Here are a few tried and true ways:

– After a stop to fill up,  the engineer can give the odometer readings for then and the previous stop and give the number of gallons of gas purchased and then ask, “Can someone be the first to calculate the gas mileage we are getting?” This can be made more challenging by giving the eager youngsters the price of gas per gallon and the total amount of the bill, instead of the number of gallons, and by taking away their calculators.

– While traveling through an area with a lot of bridges, the engineer can ask the kids to identify at least 5 different types of bridges!

– For varying speeds and direction of travel, have the children sketch out the vectors on a map, and break each down into it’s component vectors.

Yes, “Eric”, you may have music, but what happens when you are in the middle of nowhere without a good FM station to listen to? The engineer can bring along a few calculators or some graph paper or maybe just his love of equations, and the kids will have wonderful memories for years in the future of road trips with the family.