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…
Which Stereotype Are You?
Yesterday on Twitter, Chris Gammell, Carmen Parisi, and I got into a conversation about how we solve engineering problems. Chris said: Do what the rest of us do….keep adding caps and resistors until it works… And my response was: I need to simulate everything first before I start changing anything. To which Chris responded that we were both stereotypes of the academic and industrial engineers. Of course, I can’t disagree because those stereotypes are somewhat borne out by observation. I’ve seen engineers of both types, and the worst are the extremes: the thinker or the tinkerer. You have the engineers that run in and start changing things, not really thinking about what they’re doing, and then find out that what they did was rather ineffective. Then there’s the ones who sit there and never commit to anything until it’s time to finish things up because of decision paralysis. Most of…