Teaching Engineering

In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering published a report “The Engineer of the 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century.” You can read the full report online from the National Academy of Engineering webpage (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10999).Here are the attributes of the 2020 engineer identified in that report:

1. strong analytical skills

2. practical ingenuity

3. creativity

4. communication

5. mastery of principles of business and management

6. leadership

7. high ethical standards and professionalism

8. dynamism, agility, resilience and flexibility

9. lifelong learning

Practical ingenuity, creativity, leadership, and dynamism, agility, resilience and flexibility strike me as attributes that we don’t systematically think about cultivating in our engineering classes. It seems to me that in addition to valuing the usual attributes such as analytical skills, communication in oral and written form, etc., in our students (everything we do for ABET), we have to think about systematically creating value (in how we evaluate student performance perhaps) for demonstration of practical ingenuity, creativity and leadership.