Welcome Ethan - Our New Grandson

Engineering Students doing Work for the Community

Last Thursday, engineering students took a whole day to build two sculptures out of canned goods. One at Cub Foods in Grand Rapids and the other at the Central Square Mall. The structure at the grocery store is of an upside down Santa caught in a chimney. At the mall is a replica of the ICC Engineering building (Wenger Hall). Students contributed $1000 and Jerry Miner at Cub Foods contributed the rest. The nearly 5000 cans will be donated along with cash to the Second Harvest Food bank.

Tough Times

Engineering is an excellent profession. We have respect, we earn good pay, we do good things for people. I truly believe this and profess this to current and future students every day. In these times though, we get to see the downside of reality. I have recently talked to those who have been unfortunately laid off. The worst was a person I talked to yesterday who signed a contract with a company in August for a job to start now upon his college graduation. A call two weeks ago revoked the job offer. He could have spent these four months job searching, but felt secure in his having already accepted a job. We are all hearing or living stories like these right now. My words of wisdom won't help anybody pay their bills, but what I do have to say is keep faith. You are still in a high demand profession. The new president has an opportunity to pull us out of this rather soon. Let's hope he does. If you need a new job let me know, I get lots of phone calls when people need new and experienced engineers. If you have opportunities in your company, let me know.

Engineering Academy - A Step Closer

I apologize for the delay in posting. This past Monday I met with a couple people to discuss the engineering academy concept. Both were excited about the idea. Fortunately, both are in a position to make it happen in northeastern Minnesota. Perhaps, as soon as this coming Fall. Lots of things would have to happen for this engineering academy idea to become a reality. I will keep you posted.

Engineering Academy - More to Consider

If this is to work as a prototype, there are some considerations. Here are two -- please feel free to add comments with more.

1. We need the students to be awarded a degree from some real institution.  Thus to run the prototype we will need a partner university willing to support the idea and grant the degree. There are a few that I feel may be interested.

2. We are probably going to need to give potential students some sort of "guarantee" that they will have a job after this experience.  Here is an idea Aaron came up with:  At the beginning before the prototype begins, we get corporate sponsors. Companies who buy into the concept and agree to employ a student during internships and commit to employ the student full time for some period of years after their graduation.  The point of this whole thing is to create a more-ready entry level engineer for industry. We will ask them to come to the table at the beginning to have ownership in the idea and commitment to the product.

Engineering Academy - The Prototype

For the past five years, every time I thought about this idea and worked on it with over 20 colleagues from across the country, we were thinking we needed to start a new college. After all, no college we knew of could ever have the ability to reinvent itself in this format. As we went down that road, we hit the same roadblock every time - it cost a half a billion dollars to start a new college. That is an unbelievable amount of money to try and raise to essentially run an experiment. Granted it is an experiment I feel confident will succeed. There just weren't any avenues we could find to get it started.

Here is the new revelation - try it once. Take 25 students and 2 teachers. Bring in 5-10 experts per year to help lead the students through different learning activities. Evaluate the heck out of the prototype. Have 4 or 5 control groups of students that start at the same time at other institutions from various models (comm college, univ, private, etc.). Give all groups the same assessments at the beginning and at crucial places along the way and ultimately be able to show how effective this mode of education is compared to the traditional. We wouldn't need to build buildings or buy land or take 5 years to get started. We would need to find a temporary home for this small group and acquire the right set of equipment. As I estimate the costs of this prototype, they are around $5 million. This is a very small price to pay for a potentially huge reward.

Here is a quote from the former president of the National Academy of Engineering:

“I think we ought to be seeing a watershed change in engineering education---it is not happening.”…“I’ve tried to indicate to you that I think the practice of engineering is going to change tremendously and that therefore the education of engineers needs to change tremendously. I love this quote: Wayne Gretzky, probably the best hockey player who ever lived, talked about the fact that he didn’t skate to where the puck was, he skated to where the puck would be. I’m afraid that engineering education is skating to where the puck was.”

From “The Urgency of Engineering Education Reform”, Dr. William Wulf, President of the National Academy for Engineering

Ok. So I still need to find $5 million. Well, I actually have a couple of leads. Stay tuned. And please feel free to add comments. Any views from any standpoint help us as we move forward.

Engineering Academy - The Model

The student, upon arriving, works with the faculty to determine their "starting points" along a continuum of mastery in each of the ABET outcomes. For example, if complete mastery of "ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams" is defined through a set of criteria, the faculty and the individual student can assess where the student ranks against the criteria (if a ranking of 10 is perfect for a given skill, perhaps the student is starting at a 3). This way, the student knows where she is starting and what skills she is aiming to attain and can thus monitor that attainment over her education.

Now what does the learning look like?

It is a series of scenarios, cases, and projects. Each of which has components that build the students' mastery of the ABET outcomes. Here is an example of a scenario:

The teacher and the students address the question: "Why did the 35W Bridge Collapse?" In answering this question, the students would:

• completely learn the statics of the structure,
• analyze the original design,
• determine factors affecting deterioration of the bridge parts,
• delve into the economic and ethical factors precluding earlier repair of the bridge,
• compare and contrast opinions on levels of responsibility to be put on the state, the design engineers, the construction company doing the repairs at the time of collapse,
• critique the new design,
• evaluate political factors affecting bridge repair and replacement in MN and the US,
• write position papers, critique each others writing, re-write
• analyze the environmental effects of the collapse and subsequent construction
• and more...

The scenario would be their full time study for some length of time (one month? six weeks?) The faculty member would be the guide who set the parameters to ensure students continued to develop their skills and attributes to move towards mastery in several of the ABET criteria through this one scenario. And ultimately to create a set of cases, scenarios, and projects whereby all criteria are appropriately addressed and each student attains high levels of mastery.

So there it is in a nutshell. Eliminate the 45 classes and replace them with a set of scenarios that address ALL of the ABET criteria in an appropriate manner. Students go from passive receivers in boring and tedious lectures to active creators of their knowledge and skills by working in teams to address real engineering problems.

Tomorrow - How can this be done?

P.S. If you are one of the HCC alum, you have got to check this out: http://www.postbulletin.com/newsmanager/templates/localnews_story.asp?z=16&a=369638