ABSTRACT
Some of these activities were inspired by my dad, Curt Larson, who was a farm kid and child of the Depression. He could build or fix anything with carpentry, wire, or the lashing techniques he’d learned in the navy. If the first solution didn’t work, he’d try another. His larger projects began with a drawing on graph paper. This ingenuity led him to a career in engineering, as a professor of hydrology and civil engineering at the University of Minnesota. Dad provided patient encouragement and support for my junior-high-school science projects, which won modest district awards. Dad’s career focus on the dynamics of water later fed my interest in the psychological concept of “Flow,” developed by my graduate school mentor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
