How we can fix Intro to Engineering courses

http://www.genericmaker.com/2013/05/how-we-can-fix-intro-to-engineering.html

by GeorgeHahn • 13 years ago

1 3 13 years ago

dottrap2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what this article is talking about. And what engineering is this talking about? Electrical, Mechanical, Chemical, Computer?

My Electrical Engineering intro course was a weeder course, designed to be so hard, undetermined people would drop out of the major. I think there are problems with this, but it doesn't sound anything like what this article is describing.

Also in EE, while the textbooks are old, the fundamentals they teach are still needed and cannot be skipped. The real problem is that there is so much more that needs to be taught, but the schools don't have the time and are ill prepared to teach all the stuff past the basics.

In Computer Engineering/Science, nothing has really changed in 40-50 years and so called modern practices repeatedly turn out to be mostly clueless BS. People were taught Object Oriented Programming would be the panacea to all problems in the 80's and 90's. Only now, people are starting to acknowledge it is not a panacea and implementation inheritance in fact violates encapsulation, plus all the messy internal mutable state causes huge problems for both maintenance (unintended side effects) and concurrency/parallelism. All the functional programming people from 50 years ago are saying 'told you so'. (Not to mention that Alan Kay who coined the term "object oriented" thinks people from the C++/Java/C# mindset completely missed the point.)

There is also the Waterfall model which for some stupid reason was taught as a software engineering solution. It's stupid because the author who originally described the "waterfall model" criticized it as "grandiose" and said it doesn't work.

I'll take Donald Knuth's "old textbooks" any day, thank you very much.

GeorgeHahn• 13 years ago

I'm referring to generic Introduction to Engineering courses. The ones that focus on topics around engineering; things like presenting, interviewing, etc.

(Classes that use books like Studying Engineering: A Roadmap to a Rewarding Career - ISBN 0964696924)

dottrap2• 13 years ago

There was nothing like that when I went to school. Looks like a fluff course to me. (Maybe that book might be worth reading on your personal time.)

Engineering at all big schools I know about required more courses than other majors so it was much harder to graduate in 4 years, and departments looked for courses they could exempt engineering students from taking. That Intro course sounds like a prime candidate to expunge from the curriculum.

How we can fix Intro to Engineering courses

Related Stories