When I started to write the essay of “what is engineering education”, I had a hard time to integrate the former two essays into this one, because I thought engineering education was not simply the combination of engineering and education. I learnt a lot about the history and contemporary development of engineering education in the last four week’s readings, which greatly improved my understanding of the discipline. However, the readings addressed so many curriculum design and pedagogical strategies that I found it hard to pick up some “crucial points” and therefore I totally got lost.
In despair, I reread the first two essays talking about education and engineering respectively. It really helped! I quickly figured out I could utilize the structure and main theme of the first essay to write my third essay. Also I could discuss how we taught future engineers based on the characteristics of engineering that I defined in the second essay. Therefore, in this essay, I present my understanding of the aim of engineering education and how to educate engineering students to address the general question of what is engineering education. This structure is similar to that of my first essay. For instance, I discuss how to educate based on my definition of what engineering is (ideas of the second essay) and the aims of engineering education (discussed in the first part of this essay). In the last part of this essay, I propose some challenges in regards to engineering educators, which is inspired by the last week’s reading and is something that I found important to bring forward.
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