Tag Archives: engineering education

The Future is Engineering

Do Great Engineering Schools Beget Entrepreneurism? by Brent Edwards provides two great links.

How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt by Guy Kawasaki:

Focus on educating engineers. The most important thing you can do is establish a world-class school of engineering. Engineering schools beget engineers. Engineers beget ideas. And ideas beget companies. End of discussion.

If I had to point to the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence, it would be Stanford University—specifically, the School of Engineering. Business schools are not of primary importance because MBAs seldom sit around discussing how to change the world with great products.

Why Startups Condense in America:

You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said “Cambridge” followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don’t seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.

Both essays make many excellent points – read them! Continue reading →

MIT Hosts Student Vehicle Design Summit

Solar concept car drawing

Student summit set on vehicle design by Deborah Halbe

Seventy-three students from 21 universities around the world will gather at MIT this summer to design and build between five and 10 commuter vehicles that exploit human power, biofuels, solar technologies and fuel cells to travel at least 500 miles per gallon of fuel.
…
An added goal for the June 13-Aug. 13 program is to lay a foundation for ongoing multidisciplinary transportation research involving all five MIT schools. “We hope to create a project-based, socially conscious engineering curriculum for the ’06-’07 academic year,” said Anna S. Jaffe, a junior in civil and environmental engineering and one of the summit student organizers.

Image by Mitchell Joachim and William Lark, sketch of a concept solar car was created for the MIT Vehicle Design Summit.

k-12 Engineering Education

Presentation by Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston on k-12 Engineering Education.

Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to include Engineering as a topic in its Learning Standards.

Public schools from pre-kindergarten to high school are now including engineering as a new discipline. Dr. Miaoulis describes the value of including Engineering in the formal curriculum content for elementary, middle school and high school level. He also discusses the necessary partnerships between the state Department of Education, federal government, school districts, teacher groups, colleges, universities and museums and industry that are supporting this effort and the evolution of the program.

Olin Engineering Education Experiment

Excellent article: The Olin Experiment by Erico Guizzo:

Founded with more than US $460 million from the F.W. Olin Foundation, the school, which will graduate its first class at the end of this month, was conceived as perhaps the most ambitious experiment in engineering education in the past several decades. Olin’s aim is to flip over the traditional “theory first, practice later” model and make students plunge into hands-on engineering projects starting on day one. Instead of theory-heavy lectures, segregated disciplines, and individual efforts, Olin champions design exercises, interdisciplinary studies, and teamwork.

And if the curriculum is innovative, the school itself is hardly a traditional place: it doesn’t have separate academic departments, professors don’t get tenured, and students don’t pay tuition – every one of them gets a $130 000 scholarship for the four years of study.

Find out more about the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

Building a Better Engineer by David Wessel:

To a visitor, the school resembles any other small college. What’s different about it is its almost messianic mission: to change the way engineers are educated in the U.S. so that they can help the U.S. compete in a global economy with lots of smart, ambitious engineers in China, India and elsewhere. “If they become another good engineering school, they will have failed,” says Woodie Flowers, an MIT professor advising Olin. “The issue is to do it differently enough and to do it in way that will be exportable” to other colleges.

We share more thoughts on Olin’s efforts to improve engineering education on our other blog.

Harvard Elevates Engineering Profile

Harvard is planing to move engineering education to the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (via Engineering is Becoming a Liberal Art).

The Technology Mosaic by David Epstein:

as Paul S. Peercy, dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin and chair of the Engineering Dean’s Council at the American Society for Engineering Education put it: “I used to say, ‘look around, everything except the plants are engineered.’ Now I say, ‘look around, everything and some of the plants are engineered.’”

From Harvard’s announcement:

President Lawrence H. Summers. “It marks our recognition of the profound importance of technology and applied sciences for every aspect of our society. It makes visible our commitment to major new resources and faculty positions in this vital area, and our dedication to educating a new generation of technologically-literate students.

In order to provide adequate coverage of modern engineering and applied science for students and to be in the vanguard of emerging research areas, the school plans to increase the university’s engineering and applied sciences faculty by about 50 percent in the coming years.

House Testimony on Engineering Education

Testimony of Vivek Wadhwa to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce,
May 16, 2006.

Vivek Wadhwa has continued the work published in the Duke study: Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate. In the testimony he provides an update on the data provided in the report.

Contrary to the popular view that India and China have an abundance of engineers, recent studies show that both countries may actually face severe shortages of dynamic engineers. The vast majority of graduates from these counties have the qualities of transactional engineers.

Differentiating between dynamic and transactional engineers is a start, but we also need to look at specific fields of engineering where the U.S can maintain a distinct advantage. Professor Myers lists specializations such as systems biology and personalized medicine, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics that he believes will give the U.S a long term advantage.

Our education system gives our students broad exposure to many different fields of study. Our engineers learn biology and art, they gain significant practical experience and learn to innovate and become entrepreneurs. Few Indian and Chinese universities provide such advantages to their students.

The dynamic and transactional differences were mentioned in his business week article: Filling the Engineering Gap.

The conclusion he presents seems wise to me.

The numbers that are at the center of the debate on US engineering competitiveness are not accurate. The US may need to graduate more of certain types of engineers, but we have not determined what we need. By simply reacting to the numbers, we may actually reduce our competitiveness. Let’s better understand the problem before we debate the remedy.

Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers

Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers

Currently, 451,000 Mexican students are enrolled in full-time undergraduate programs, vs. just over 370,000 in the U.S. The Mexican students benefit from high-tech equipment and materials donated to their schools by foreign companies, which help develop course content to fit their needs. Many of these engineers graduate knowing how to use the latest computer-assisted design (CAD) software and speaking fluent English.

Another country on the engineering education bandwagon for economic growth.

Those figures are quite impressive. I would like to see what Vivek Wadhwa (one of the authors of the Duke study: USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates) says about the comparability of the figures. Still, the number of engineering undergraduate students in Mexico surprises me; this is one more indication of how many people see the value of engineering education.

Related:

Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering

See more recent post with data from 2005-2009: S&P 500 CEO’s: Engineers Stay at the Top

The most common undergraduate degree for CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies is Engineering: with 20% of all CEOs (from 2005 CEO Study: A Statistical Snapshot of Leading CEOs

Another interesting point from the report (at least to those of us who grew up in Madison with a father who taught at the University of Wisconsin (teaching Chemical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Statistics, in my father’s case, by the way):

For the second year in a row, the University of Wisconsin joins Harvard as the most common undergraduate university attended by S&P 500 CEOs. Prior to 2004, Harvard alone was the most common school attended.

2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events

2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events in Philadelphia, Denver, Houston and more 30 March – 1 April.

Competition events are, in the words of our teams, “full of passion, excitement, joy, and sorrow…the thrill of success and the agony of defeat.” The FIRST Robotics Competition has grown to 33 regional events and the Championship.

Boston FIRST Robotics Event by Computer Science Teacher

I was amazed at how much interest in engineering and science FIRST generated. A lot of students were inspired to look at area of education that they had never ever thought about before.

One of the things I noticed this year was that the number of girls involved in FIRST continues to climb. At the Boston event three of the 44 teams were all girls. All of the teams seemed to have significant numbers of girls. People at FIRST say that there are upwards of 30% girls in the program. That could be better of course but it is growing.
…
I highly recommend you drop in on one. FIRST has to be seen to really be understood.

Students at FIRST Robotics competition

See previous post: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST)

Engineering Education Worldwide

Quality vs. Quantity in Engineering

This article discusses the Duke study (USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates) proposing an adjustment to the numbers used for comparing engineering education results of the United States, China and India.

Like Wadhwa, Johnson suggested that the recent emphasis on increasing the number of engineers in America should take a back seat to promoting quality. “The fact there may be X, Y or Z number of [science and engineering graduates] floating around, doesn’t necessarily speak to the question of does that represent the actual high level high skill innovative talent American industries are looking for,” he said.

Related Posts: