Open Ended Questions
I’ve been wanting to post on the topic of Open Ended Questions for some time but haven’t been able to formulate my thoughts properly. One of the things that I think defines a person as an engineer is the ability to put forth potential solutions to open ended questions which may have several answers. I am particularly discussing questions where there is not one ideal solution but rather a series of tradeoffs and the person answering the question must justify their choices. One of the things I tried to do in the classes I taught this past year was to keep some questions open ended to see how students would formulate their answers. In some cases, this was successful but in others, not so much. The other thing that struck me as strange is there wasn’t always a connection between a student’s standing and their ability to answer open ended…
Require Humanities Students to Take Core STEM Classes
Last week, Miss MSE discussed how engineers must be capable of telling a good story in order to effectively communicate scientific information. At the end of her post, Miss MSE discusses how she “generally in favor of humanities requirements for engineers” and has discussed more on it here. I wrote a brief comment stating that I am not in favor of humanities requirements for engineers and I want to clarify it more here. Just a forewarning, I’m going to start overly broad and then narrow down to the specific argument. We (as a society) tend to have grandiose discussions surrounding education. Philosophically, we try to construct curricula to challenge and stimulate the mind. In theory, that’s a great thing that we should strive for. But in the society we live in (today), I don’t think it’s possible for students to learn a compendium of topics ranging from art to zoology…
Fantasy Curriculum
This post probably won’t win me any favors with faculty in other engineering disciplines but it’s something I think should be investigated as a possible method to improve the undergraduate curriculum (particularly in ME). Since I’m a ME by background, I’ll stick with that curriculum because I know it better than others, but this thought process is probably adaptable to EE, civil, and a few other core engineering disciplines. Most of the courses in a typical ME curriculum center around solid mechanics, dynamics, thermo, some materials, some design, and some lab classes. And with those classes, you generally have to take a few physics classes, a bunch of math/statistics, probably a chemistry, and probably an electrical/controls course. Now here’s the big change. For ME students, all of the engineering/physics/chemistry classes should be taught by ME faculty, not within their own departments. Wait a few seconds to let that seep in……