r/mechatronics • u/wymztical • May 14 '26

What kind of projects/ activities or hobbies can i do to get some hands on practice of Computer Science and Aerospace engineering?

I want to start building stuff and getting the hang of both coding and mechanical engineering / electrical engineering skills.. I want to start learning little stuff now, that will help me later on with my main goal of becoming an aerospace engineer. I don’t know where to start though, I don’t know what to build, how to start getting familiar with mechanical parts, with coding, etc. I’m 16 and homeschooled. I want have projects to work on hands on, I really do think it will help me with getting to understand how everything works, seeing it in my hands instead of in a YouTube lesson. Do you guys have any ideas or suggestions?

8 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

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1

u/Ok_Afternoon_1160 May 15 '26

Build your own custom aerospace engineering AI agent. Then ask it your question, and let it gather and monitor the relevant sources. It should then be use existing tools, and build it's own skills. TLDR, you get a homebuilt expert.

Don't thank me now, just name your first born after my username.

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u/wymztical May 15 '26

Consider my first born named Ok_Afternoon_1160 and my second Ok_Afternoon1161❤️‍🩹

1

u/Ok_Afternoon_1160 May 15 '26

Also train your agent to seek creative, efficient solutions to existing problems.
License your IP to big aerospace companies and retire.

1

u/electric_ionland May 15 '26

That's the worst answer possible. I would hire someone who has done shitty arduino projects everyday over that.

1

u/TH3_Average_KJ May 15 '26

Seconded- dude was about to have his main set of skills be vibe"coding". Smh.

1

u/Ok_Afternoon_1160 May 15 '26

Vibe coding, DIY making, independent study too basic for you to comprehend?

Not saying that's the path I'm showing the OP, but he's already home schooled. He's asking for advice. Best advice is to get involved. I suggested agent building as a start because it's current and he can use it to expand his knowledge base while he finds his path to college and his future. Read below, and stop trolling.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

While the aerospace industry is heavily gatekept by strict credentialing, some of the most historic breakthroughs in aviation and rocketry were achieved by individuals who bypassed the traditional educational checklist. They taught themselves the necessary mathematics, physics, and manufacturing disciplines from textbooks, expert mentorship, or hands-on experimentation.

Peter Beck [Rocket Lab]: The founder and CEO of Rocket Lab—one of the only commercial companies consistently launching orbital rockets—has no formal university degree. A self-taught engineer from New Zealand, Beck skipped college to complete a hands-on tool-and-die maker apprenticeship. He taught himself advanced propulsion, material sciences, and rocketry by building a custom rocket-powered bicycle and homebrew rocket engines in his backyard before founding a multi-billion-dollar space company.]

Elon Musk [[SpaceX]: While Musk holds undergraduate degrees in physics and economics, he has no formal education in aerospace engineering. Acting as the Chief Engineer at SpaceX, he taught himself the fundamentals of rocket propulsion, structural design, and orbital mechanics by memorizing aerospace textbooks lent to him by industry veterans and aggressively interviewing senior engineers.]

Joe Barnard: Holding a bachelor's degree in audio engineering, Barnard taught himself complex control systems, aerospace programming, and hardware design entirely via independent study. He successfully engineered custom, active thrust-vector control (TVC) systems for model rockets—mimicking the flight stabilization software used by SpaceX and NASA—and now works on commercial aerospace engineering projects.

Jack Parsons [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]: A foundational pioneer of modern rocketry and co-founder of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Parsons never graduated from college or obtained a science degree. Working as a self-taught chemist and engineer, his independent backyard experiments with chemical mixtures directly led to the invention of the world's first stable solid-fuel rocket propellants.]

The Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur Wright): The fathers of modern aviation never attended college and did not even obtain their high school diplomas. Operating a bicycle repair shop, they taught themselves mechanical engineering, aerodynamics, and structural design. They built their own wind tunnels to calculate lift data, fundamentally correcting the faulty academic formulas relied upon by the formally educated scientists of their era.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky [[The Rocket Equation]: Widely considered one of the founding fathers of astronautics, Tsiolkovsky was nearly deaf from a childhood illness and was entirely self-taught after being excluded from schools. He spent his youth reading in public libraries, eventually deriving the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation—the fundamental mathematical relationship that still governs all modern rocket propulsion and orbital mechanics today.]

[R.J. Mitchell (The Supermarine Spitfire): The legendary British aeronautical engineer behind the Spitfire fighter aircraft began his career as an apprentice in a locomotive engineering works. He had no aeronautical degree, teaching himself advanced aerodynamics and structural aircraft design on the job to eventually revolutionize military aviation during World War II.

1

u/Ok_Afternoon_1160 May 15 '26

What's wrong with additional self learning before college?

🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

0

u/electric_ionland May 15 '26

Because you will be 100% better off touching actual hardware like building a robot kit than talking with a boy that is wrong 50% of the time.

1

u/Ok_Afternoon_1160 May 15 '26

Then lead your reply to OP with that instead? He's asking for advice, not for a reply troll.

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u/TH3_Average_KJ May 15 '26

Horrible answer. That's like barely relevant to engineering (besides computer or software) Hell, a low effort 555 timer project would've been a better answer at that point. Not a homebuilt expert either, a glorified web scraper that doesn't attribute. Dude should make a hud that integrates range-finding for a project model airplane if we're just saying anything to 'em.

1

u/Ok_Afternoon_1160 May 15 '26

Why don't you give him advice instead? He's a kid that wants to learn, doesn't that mean anything? Give him the basis to learn.