Teaching Engineering

Well, I have made a promise to myself that I will write at least 200 words every day, and what better place to do this than on my blog! And what better to write about than my teaching and some of my thinking about my teaching.I know, I know, what you’re thinking…but, hey, with my new 24-inch monitor comin’ in next week, I can’t wait to make use of all the extra desktop space I will get – funny, how we always look for some external motivator to keep us from becoming lazy! So, laziness is why I have not updated this blog in a while. I have still continued to think about teaching engineering in the time that I have not spent time writing about my thinking.

Well…we start school tomorrow. I am coordinating the IE capstone design in the afternoon, and teaching a graduate course in advanced work design in the evening. I have about 20 students in each class.

Seniors have been working on their design projects from this past December – gives them a bit of time during the holidays to find a good design project, and define a good problem to work on during the semester. We are changing some of the report formats this semesterto emphasize technical writing. I think our students are getting really good at making technical presentations – they embed videos, and are real creative in how they frame the problem and define their solutions. Where they need to do more I think is in the report writing part, which we have decided to emphasize this semester. There is also some heartache about teaming!  Has been for a while! We use the model where instructors form teams of 2 or 3 students every semester; let’s see how things go this semester.

The graduate course is something I also enjoy teaching. I have completely redesigned the format of the course to minimize my lecturing and maximize discussions and asking questions in class. All topics in the work design course are structured around important topics in work design and for each topic I have generated 5 questions that students prepare answers for; then, we discuss the 5 questions in class and I give my perspective on the questions. There is no right answer to the questions, and that makes this class very exciting and dynamic for me. I learn from this class every time. Students are all full-time working engineers in industry, so they bring so much practice perspectives into the discussion. I bring theoretical perspectives to the class, and we get such a great blend of theory and practice in this class.

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.