Category Archives: Education

High School Engineering Education

Web site devoted to a comprehensive engineering program at my former high school: Madison West High School (see Curious Cat Madison West High School Alumni page).

These courses are organized around a set of concepts, skills and attitudes necessary for an engineering career. Unfortunately, students in many other schools can still graduate having had no practical contact with engineering concepts or case studies. A major problem of secondary education is that schools teach science, technology, and mathematics only in the context of the specific disciplines. These courses solve that problem. It shows students the important engineering concepts and has them work on real-world case studies resembling the problems they will be solving in an engineering career.

Another high school engineering related effort is the Statistical Design of Experiments Program at the Macomb Intermediate School District (it also has a Madison connection. From the history on their web site: “In 1984, Kathy and Bob Peterson participated in a special Woodrow Wilson Foundation summer institute on Quantitative Literacy in Princeton, NJ. A principal organizer and speaker at that conference was the late William Hunter, a professor of statistics at the University of Wisconsin.”

What Everyone Should Learn

If you could teach the world one thing from Spiked (unfortunately they broke all the links so I removed them all). Spiked has published thier survey of 250 Scientists including 11 Nobel laureates in honor of Einstein Year (which marks the centenary of the publication of Albert Einstein’s equation E = mc2). Good stuff, including:

Dr. Vincent Cerf: “I would want people to really understand the theory of evolution and the origin of species. The power of cumulative, adaptive change in the genome, over the course of billions of years and changing conditions, is hard for many people to fully appreciate.”

Dr. Richard Tresch Fienberg: “Science is not a collection of facts, nor is it even a collection of ideas; it is an activity by which curious human beings seek to make sense of the natural world.”

Dr. Simon Best: “I should teach the world the basics of the scientific method per se, and the basic statistical tools that support it. I feel passionately that these are core tools of citizenship, that – once grasped – allow anyone to ask the right questions of scientists and their respective advocates and opponents, whether in the private or the public sector.”