Teaching Engineering

This is my second post on the 2020 Engineer theme and certainly won’t be the last one, I don’t think!  2020…that’s about 12 years from now!   Isn’t 12 years a pretty long planning horizon to plan for? I wonder why the National Academy of Engineering report that I blogged about in a previous post picked 2020 to plan for. 20 years into the 21st century!

Well, in any case, I mentioned in my previous post about the 2020 engineer that I was part of a NSF CCLI Phase 2 project on cultivating authentic discourse for the 2020 engineer. I thought I would write a little about this project.

My co-author of this blog, Louis Everett, had a National Science Foundation CCLI Phase 1 project on using multiple intelligences to teach dynamics. Based on results from that first grant, we got together with colleagues Violet Jones, Kerrie Kephart and Elsa Villa from the College of Education here at UTEP and wrote a Phase 2 proposal to NSF. And NSF gave us half a million dollars (although I’ve never seen anything larger than a 20 dollar bill in my life so far) to research how we can cultivate authentic engineering discourse for the 2020 engineer.

We use counterintuitive problems to systematically try and uncover student misconceptions in engineering concepts. Designing these counterintuitive activities are not trivial – it is difficult even for faculty (who have PhDs). Our colleagues from College of Education observe what we do and what happens in the classroom to see if learning occurs. Faculty think about their thinking (like what I am doing in this blog), so faculty learn too. We have several faculty from UTEP, and faculty from NMSU, Baylor, UT Panam, and Prairie View A & M already trying these methods in their classes.

If you are a faculty and would like to be part of our project or try some of our methods, send me an email at apennathur@utep.edu. You can also read about our project at http://2020engineer.iss.utep.edu/world.