Teaching Engineering

I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I’ve always thought myself up to date but …

Who reads this stuff anyway?

okay so now that Arun has demonstrated to everyone that I am too inefficient to actually get my work done, I’m not sure what to say.

 I assume one of the things this blog is about is issues involved in teaching engineering. So here we go, comment on this:

I believe engineering teaches a lot of how to do a lot of little things: how to get the efficiency of a rankine cycle, how to draw a freebody diagram, how to … What we seem to be missing are the big things. How do you find a new idea? How do you know whether or not you can put a satellite into orbit? How do you know the little green men on Mars really are friendly? Okay maybe the last one is silly… everyone knows the men on Mars are purple.

 Anyway, licensing exams require graduates to be able to do these little things but to really make progress you need to do the big things. So… what should we be teaching? is it easier to do big things once you know how to do the little ones? or is it easier to do the little things once you know the big ones? (Who can tell me what the big things are?)

Anyway…. there Arun … Ha! I posted.