Tinkering as a valid part of education
A profesor I once knew began a conversation with, “What classes are you taking this semester?” I responded, “I’m taking a class on teaching, a-” “Teaching?! Why are you taking a class on teaching? You don’t need a class to learn how to teach. You just do it.” The irony of this is that this professor was considered one of the worst teachers in the whole department. Chris’ post on a ‘tinkering class’ got me thinking (again) about what is really a good way to educate people. And despite some of the comments on Reddit, Chris is actually on the right track for some of the more current thinking on approaches to STEM education. So what do you want from someone educated in a STEM field? Obviously they have to have a certain amount of background knowledge, they need to have problem solving skills, they need to be inquisitive and…
Training the Next Crop
Crop of engineers that is. I’ve been thinking a lot about senior projects lately. The way my own school works, being not on the semester system, is a 12-13 week program split over a couple terms. About 50% of the projects coming in are from the school itself, research based, and more than likely medical in nature. The other 50% come from industry but the vast majority from the Navy. We have a local facility that is kind of like its own DARPA in creative and research based endeavors. The projects have varied widely. Some were bioengineering based where students were asked to design a machine that would measure a very specific amount of blood to verify another machine was working properly. They ended up with a setup of capillary tubes and using a microscope-camera and labview to measure pixels that once properly calibrated would measure the volume of fluid.…
Remedial Tinkering Class
A friend and I were discussing engineering education yesterday. The state of the education system, the constant lamenting of fewer engineers coming out of the US and our own experiences. Of course there are a ton of problems right now. And yes, there are also a lot of potential solutions in place. But out of this discussion came an irrefutible argument and idea: (Most) engineering students need a remedial tinkering class “Hunh? A what? I’ve never heard of that,” you say. Well, it’s because it doesn’t exist. But it exists for a lot of other subjects. If you weren’t all that great at math in high school, you can usually find a remedial math class to brush up on your algebra. If you’re from out of the country and english is a second language, there are often resources to help bring you up to a level where you’ll have a…
Physics Caused The Sparks
Unlike the hobbyists I interact with all the time on The Amp Hour (or our recent guest blogger Paul Clarke), I didn’t start working on electronics at a young age. Nope, my story is much closer to that of Fluxor’s; my story began in high school. In fact, it makes me wonder if there is a separate class of engineers that didn’t consider the profession until entering college. I’d also wonder how they might differ from the hobbyist type, but that seems to be a discussion for another time and post. So how’d I decide which career path to try? Physics! I loved physics. I still love physics. I love simple models for really complex things. I love having well defined problems (though those rarely occur these days) and later exploring more intricate details as necessary. And most of all, I loved that feeling of “getting it”. It’s like a drug and…
Baby Steps into Engineering
For my first blog here on Engineer Blogs, it’s a great opportunity to introduce myself through this weeks topic: how we became engineers. I’m an electronics engineer with a passion for digital and embedded microprocessors. I’m not certain that any of us consider ourselves normal engineers or that our routes to get here are typical. However, I certainly know that my route of getting into electronics at a very young age is definitely different. I became interested in geeky stuff when I was less than ten years old. I remember being given a toy wind up clock that you could open the back of and pull all the gears out and then put it back together to make it work. I was always interested in how and why stuff worked and in the 70’s, there was no kids TV on early, only Open University programs. I would be playing on…
Uh…What’s Engineering?
That’s the question I found myself asking my father during my last year of high school. I was good in math and physics and it seemed that would be my fate in university — a pure math or physics degree. But when my dad suggested that I go into engineering, I had had only the vaguest notions of what it was. Engineers build things, he tells me. That’s great! I wanted to build a spaceship! I also found out something new about my father — he’s an engineer! Heck, I just thought he oversaw the building of container ships. I didn’t know they had a name for such people! Later on, I would see my dad work as a contractor for the U.S. Navy in Norfolk, Vriginia, setting foot on the most advanced naval warships and aircraft carriers in the world. Cool stuff, I thought. You see, that’s what I…
What did I get myself into?
We’ve decided to occasionally focus a series of posts on themes. You probably noticed that we did this a couple weeks ago when discussing engineering salaries. This week, we’re going to discuss how we each got into engineering. I am guessing that, unlike my fellow bloggers, I got into engineering by accident. That is, I never had any intent to become an engineer, but things worked out that way. I did my undergraduate studies in physics with minors in math and geology, intending to go into computational geophysics after I finished. While I was going to school, I met my husband, who was doing his PhD in electrical engineering. All was well and good until I finished my bachelor’s degree, and he was just starting on his dissertation. Things might have worked out fine, except the closest school with a geophysics doctoral program is four hours away, and I was…
Winter Thought Exercise
All across the midwest this evening, they’ve been calling the most recent stormfront the Blizzard of 2011. Whether or not it will develop into a truly nasty storm remains to be seen. But it did get me thinking (and yes, a little bit scared): If you had to generate all you own power starting tomorrow, do you think you could do it? Posing this question to a few co-workers and myself gave me pause. I understand the scope and magnitude of power generation. It’s no small feat! Aside from the fact that we just expect power to be there these days, we don’t usually have a real feel for how much total power we use and how hard it is it actually generate that power. But we’re all engineers around here, right? (or at least masochists who enjoy reading about engineering) So let’s figure out what it would take and…