What is Engineering in ENGR131?

On the first day of class in ENGR131, the first year engineering class at Purdue, we of course address the question, what is engineering?

The definition of the engineering profession as given by ABET is in the textbook and in the standard set of slides that get shared among all the faculty teaching the class.

"The profession in which knowledge of the mathematical and natural sciences, gained by study and practice, is applied with judgment to develop ways to use, economically, the materials and forces of nature for the benefit of mankind."

I think this gives a very narrow view of engineering and doesn't even begin to address the social and environmental constraints engineers must work under. I wanted to get another message out there to help balance some of the ineptitudes of this one, so I chose a quote from William A Wulf (former president of National Academy of Engineering).

"My favorite operational definition of engineering is 'design under constraint.' Engineering is creating, designing what can be, but is constrained by nature, by cost, by concern of safety, reliability, environmental impact, manufacturability, maintainability, and many other such 'ilities.' Engineering is not 'applied science.' To be sure, our understanding of nature is one of the constraints we work under, but it far from the only one, it is seldom the hardest one, and almost never the limiting one."

I still get goose bumps when I read this quote. Simple but so powerful. This quote really resonated with the message from Jonassen that workplace problems are more that solving math ands science problems. They are messy with social and political constraints that engineering grads are not prepared to handle. Dall'Alba set the stage for us by saying that skills and knowledge are not enough for skillful practice and Jonassen gave us the backdrop for a discussion of engineering education reform.

From toddler to engineering educator

To be quite frank, I have been feeling like a toddler lately. While transforming my views about education into an essay, I felt like a teething toddler learning to talk at the same time. The thoughts were there, but it was a painful process to translate those thoughts into words that others could understand. That pain was similar to the pain a toddler feels as her first tooth grows in. Education was my first tooth; engineering is my second. Ideally, those teeth will work together to chew through the topic of engineering education.

For now, I want to talk about our first dabble in the engineering aspect of the course. One of Jonassen’s themes and one recommendation in “Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering: Lessons for Engineering Educators” really resonated with me. The theme was about communication. I know from personal experience the lack of emphasis engineering programs place on effective communication skills, both oral and written. It also seems to me that without those written skills it becomes increasingly difficult to verbalize one’s ideas. I ran into this problem with the education essay. Rather than communicating with words, I was used to communicating with numbers and symbols. It was much easier to write, and even think, in formulas and diagrams than in full sentences. It made me wonder if this was happening to anyone else – engineering students, faculty, practicing engineers, etc. For those with similar experiences, we must ask ourselves several questions. How critical are these written and oral skills? And how can we, as future engineering educators, make the teething process less painful?


The second aspect of the article I found interesting was about problem-based learning. During the summer I interned at NASA Glenn Research Center, working with a curriculum specialist who was constructing problem-based learning units (PBIU’s) for K-12 students. Throughout the summer we brainstormed ideas about how to create PBIU’s that would fulfill Ohio educational standards in such a way that was active and engaging. One of my many tasks was to create a challenge for NASA’s Human Space Flight Explorer Post, a year-long after school program for high schoolers. The challenge was to be incorporated in the Mars Exploration unit, using Lego Mindstorms (robots). I ended up creating a very open-ended activity in which the two teams of students were only given a mission – to find Martian soil and test for moisture content. They needed to design their own robot, choose which sensors (light, soil moisture, motion, etc.) to use, create and implement a computer program to complete the mission, and finally report their findings in a press conference. Before the end of the summer my mentor wanted to make sure this was feasible, so with help from my sister we tested the activity. This is when I realized the tremendous effort problem-based learning requires from teachers. In order for students to learn what the state says they should learn, the teacher needs to be aware of the possible outcomes to assess what the students actually learned. So here’s my big question: is this feasible?

Well, I feel much better now. After getting my thoughts out in this blog post, my new teeth aren’t hurting so much. Have a great weekend!

Class notes (Sep 30)

As I promised, I'm uploading the photos of our last class.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Also I want to highlight the similarities of our work with Tosin's group (figs 1 & 4), doing a parallel between well-structured problem and a real engineering problem, from two different author perspective.

Koen states, as I see it, about engineering problem solving, from a method point of view. Jonassen also is focused in problem solving, but explaining what an engineering problem should be. Looking the method of problem solving, or the characteristics of the problem itself, I can found some interesting parallels...

Koen	Jonassen	Reflection
Change: Deciding which path to take from point A to point B	Some times there are many goals, or conflict goals Problems can be solved in many different ways	For both, there are many paths, starting points and goals. For me, engineering is very complex, specially when is social engineering.
Resources: Creating a new world with available resources	Most constrains are non-engineering (like time or money) "Knowledge exists not only in the heads of learners, but also in the conversations and social relations among collaborators" pg.144	I see constrains as part of the resources, and some times engaging ones. For example, the right part of Tosin's group cardboard was "empty" (showing an ill-stuctured problem) but its size was the constraint, when designing a problem.
Best: Finding an optimal solution, in response of people's needs	Encounter unanticipated problems and more than one solution Is a group construction, for people's (client) needs.	I think engineering is always looking people's needs. It could be in terms of society, individuals, even ourselves. Always looking for a result (engineers as doers, as Figueiredo explained).
Uncertainty: Identifying the absence of all the information	"Probably the biggest challenge that we see in some of these projects is dealing with incomplete information" pg.142	The complexity of engineering problems leads to huge amounts of information, always incomplete as both authors said. Angela puts this idea in one sentence: "where does uncertainty comes from?"

Big Decisions....

I've been thinking quite a bit about the Koen article this week. Aside from some gender issues that I noticed and tried to ignore and the clumsy way he made several of his points, I did feel there were some interesting ones.

His implication that engineers make big decisions struck me. (This was one of his clumsy points.) But if you think about it, engineers are in on the decisions of what gets made, gets produced, is put on the market. They aren't the only ones at that decision table, but they are there. That discussion reminded me of the reason that I became intersted in engineering.

When I was a child, my dad would come home from work frustrated and upset with the engineers. He was a construction electrician and before that worked on an automotive assembly line. He would say that the engineers just wouldn't listen to his ideas, and that he could do things faster/better/more efficient than the plans called for. I asked him what an engineer was. His comment went something like this: I don't know what an engineer really is. But I do know this. If you want to be where the action is, if you want to have a say in what gets made and what doesn't, then you have to be an engineer. He was saying that engineers make big decisions. And that's the part that really interested me. He was an "outsider" to engineering, and I wanted to be an insider. I wanted to make decisions and shape the future.

Koen's argument about uncertainty also struck a chord. "The engineer doesn't know where he is, where he is going, how he is going to get there, or is anyone will care when he does." I think this is another clumsily made point - I don't think he gives engineers enough credit. While there is certainly lots of uncertainty in any engineering problem solving situation, engineers are not as clueless as he makes them seem. And the entire Koen article talks in a way that makes it appear that engineers work in solitude. As we all know, they do not. And there is usually enough knowledge on the team that there is a pretty good idea of where they are, where they are going, how they are going to get there, and that someone will care when they do. The uncertainties are not as large as Koen makes them (but they are vastly larger than what we teach our students about). (Look, another tension!)

I could go on with other points (i.e. scientists look for "the" answer, engineers look for "an" answer), but it's late and tomorrow is another day for big decisions.

YouTube groups

YouTube groups for this semester are:

Lorie, Tamecia, Angela (when in class)
Hadi, Tosin, Mariana
Cindy, Nichole, Julia
Diana, Beth, Corey
Xingyu, Jeff, Ruth
Ben, Natalie, Dan
Tatiana, Jeremi, Nikitha

Engineers are NOT anti-social!

I really appreciated this week’s articles, in that they provided me with a prelude to the next round of discussions as we begin to answer the question, “What is Engineering?” Tomorrow, I am attending a workshop and as a result of this, will, unfortunately, not be able to enjoy a significant portion of tomorrow’s class discussion. However, in lieu of my absence, I just wanted to officially declare that contrary to popular belief, engineers are NOT anti-social! :-) Now before you put my name on a list for special prayer, let me clear that air and say that I am not actually upset about the assumption embedded in the statement just proclaimed, nor am I saying that this is everyone’s view of engineers. LOL. (This comment is just being used in direct response to some of the feedback I have received when talking to my friends who pursued fields of study other than engineering and to jumpstart another discussion.) Among other things, I found it very interesting that each of the articles for this week's readings contained references to the social dynamic of the engineering field – and not just confining this idea to the fact that we oftentimes work in teams to solve problems.

I think there's a lot of truth in Vygotsky’s philosophy of education – especially the claims that suggest the importance of social interaction during an educational experience (Noddings, 2007, p. 16). Now although I am not speaking about engineers as learners nor am I suggested that the articles for this week did either, to me, there is still a connection worth noting about the importance of social interaction within the engineering profession. Each of the articles alluded to the fact that engineers are not anti-social. See for yourself.

*Figueiredo referred to engineers as “social experts” because within their team, they created solutions that were of social and economic importance, and that customer satisfaction is at the forefront of each design.

*Jonassen, Strobel, and Lee interviewed many engineers and after coding the results and identifying themes among them, at least three suggested a social component:
E. Theme 5. Success is Rarely Measured by Engineering Standards (including the satisfaction of the customer)
G. Theme 7. Problem Solving Knowledge is Distributed Among Team Members
H. Theme 8. Most Problems Require Extensive Collaboration (with engineerings and those in other professions)

*Koen mentioned constraints and resources as important characteristics of engineering problems and in each of these sections, there were references to the involvement & interaction of those within and outside of the engineering field – and their significance in relation to the work that we do.

In closing, I really appreciated the sneak-peek into the next phase of the course via this week’s articles. Now I have at three articles to recommend to my friends who continue to tout that “engineers are ant-social!” LOL.

Reference:
Noddings, N. (2007). Philosophy of Education, 2nd Ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

I'll try to keep this short as it is a synthesis on education, and not commentary on the new readings for this week.

As I am S-L-O-W-L-Y getting my essay finalized, I am feel like I'm making random connections all over the place, and at a very rapid pace. I want to put them ALL in my essay, which of course is completely ludicrous, because then my essay would be all over the place. So I need an outlet for some of the things jumping around in my head that I haven't quite found a home for yet.


Herbart to Kolb?
Herbart's five-step lesson - preparation, presentation, comparison, abstraction, generalization
Kolb's experiental learning cycle - abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, concrete experience, reflective observation

Notice a common thread of learning occurring as a cycle. This could also be linked to the constructivist camp, as once you have been through one cycle you add another "layer" and repeat the process, and thus "construct" knowledge.

Side note: Svinicki & Dixon [1] expand on Kolb's model to add degrees of active learning where student is actor (i.e. laboratory experiment or journaling) and passive learning where student is receiver (i.e. lecture or viewing film). FYI: This is a really good paper on incorporating active learning in the classroom.

Piaget to Perry?
From the first introduction to Piaget (along with others in constructivist camp such as Kohlberg and especially Vygotsky who focused on "social constructivism") I thought of Perry's [2] stages of intellectual development. While I won't say that Perry builds directly from Piaget, they do align somewhat, with Paiget focusing on early development and Perry on early adulthood. Perry uses specific stages of development to implicate what a student may or may not be "ready" for in an educational environment. For example, if a student in Perry's position 1 of duality (thinks in terms of right and wrong, solves problems by following instructions of Authority) is given an authentic, ill-formed, open-ended problem, the likely result is that the student will "freak out" and not succeed in coming to a solution. If the same problem was given to a student in Perry's position 5 of relativism (which is also referred to as "turning the bend" - where the student sees everything as relative and absolutes are the exception) the student would not feel as intimidated by the divergence of possibilities and would likely be successful in reaching a reasonable solution.

Today in some searching for information, I discovered that I am not the only one to make this connection. Below is an excerpt from Chapter 14 of "Teaching Engineering" by Philip Wankat* and Frank Oreovicz [3]. The authors add that while Piaget and Perry do have some common threads the also have pronounced differences in concentration.


"It would be convenient if Perry’s scheme started where Piaget’s theory stops. Chronologically, the two theories do fit this way, but in other more important ways the theories are not a match. Perry does use Piaget’s ideas of how students learn. That is, a certain amount of disequilibration is necessary for accommodation to occur. However, Perry’s theory is not concerned with problem solving and the applications of logic as are the concrete and formal operational stages of Piaget’s theory. Briefly stated, Perry’s model is concerned first with how students move from a dualistic (right versus wrong) view of the universe to a more relativistic view, and second, how students develop commitments within this relativistic world. There is a strong learning connotation in Perry’s model since students cannot understand or answer questions which are in a developmental sense too far above them."

(*Note Dr. Wankat is a professor in Purdue School of Chemical Engineering and has recently won ASEE 2010 best paper award for ChE Division - you can download full copy of this book from ChE website, see URL link at the end of my post)


Dewey (and a few others) to How People Learn [4]

HPL: Knowledge Centered - The aim of teaching is learning, specifically, what should be taught and why?
Dewey - Students should play active role in setting their own learning objectives
Schon: New scholarship requires new epistemology
Dall'Alba: Ontology should not be neglected in favor of epistemology

HPL: Learner Centered - Includes understanding of student's prior experience and how that experience will affect their learning
Dewey - "The more a teacher is aware of the past experiences of students, of their hopes, desires, chief interests, the better will be understood the forces at work [of the students] that need to be directed and utilized for formation of reflective habits" (Noddings pg 50)
Dall'Alba - Everydayness of becoming - as a teacher/expert you forget and perhaps take for granted what is a crucial and incremental step for a novice.

HPL: Community Centered - Focus on norms and modes of operation
Dewey: Learning is something that must be initiated by the student, teacher is a guide
Palmer: "By 'space' I mean a complex of factors: physical arrangement and feeling of the room, the conceptual framework that I build around the topic my students and I are exploring, the emotional ethos I hope to facilitate, and the ground rules that will guide our inquiry." (pg 73)
Buber: Education is relation - learning via community and dialogue

HPL: Assessment Centered - All successful learning environment must also be assessment-centered - using combinations of formative (designed for feedback and to inform future instruction) and summative (to "index" what has been learned) assessments
Dewey: not enough to stop at awareness, teach must follow up to see what student has learned beyond initial awareness through inquiry.
Palmer: A little more abstract - but his personal anecdotes about his dialogues with his students sound very assessment-centered (formatively) in that he is constantly adjusting his guidance of a particular lecture to the response of his students.


Well so much for short, but I feel better!


In case you are interested, here are references to readings that were not part of H&Ph class:
[1] Svinicki, M. D., & Dixon, N. M. (1987). The Kolb model modified for classroom activities. College Teaching, 35 (Fall 1987), 141-146.
[2] Culver, R. S., & Hackos, J. T. (1982). Perry's Model of Intellectual Development. Engineering Education, 73(Dec), 221-226.
[3] Wankat, P. C., & Oreovicz, F. S. (1993). Teaching Engineering. New York: McGraw-Hill.
URL: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ChE/AboutUs/Publications/TeachingEng/index.html
[4] Bransford, J., Vye, N., & Bateman, H. (2002). Creating High-Quality Learning Environments: Guidelines from Research on How People Learn. In P. A. Graham & N. G. Stacey (Eds.), The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
URL: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10239&page=159

Differences between an Engineer and a scientist/mathematician in my eye

The articles about engineering written by Figuoeira, Jonassen, and Koen described engineering from different point of view, but there are some common characteristics in their definition of an engineer: applying science results to solve practical problems, strong problem-solving skills, and using certain criteria for evaluating outcomes. I think they help distinguish an engineer from a scientist/mathematician.

I think the biggest difference between a scientist/mathematician and an engineer is that while a scientist/mathematician concentrates mainly on the research of concept theories, an engineer is adept at applying scientific results to solve practical problems. I had been a mathematics student for six years. Most knowledge I learnt were pure mathematics which included lots of abstract mathematical notations. I was taught to comprehend the meaning of theorems and formulas and gave strict proof of them but never paid much attention to their usage in real-world problems. I used to ask my advisor how I could apply those abstract concepts to solve practical problems. His answer was that a real mathematician never cared about the application of his work. Such applicability should be the concern of an engineer. He cited an example of the great mathematician Leonhard Euler who made important discoveries of Differential Geometry. Euler would never know how vast applications his discoveries would have in the fields of mechanics and engineering problems. In this point, the relationship between scientist/mathematician and engineer is very tight. What a scientist/mathematician discovers is hard to benefit mankind if there is no engineer that can convert it into something of practical use. On the other hand, there will be no theory for engineers to base upon if no scientist/mathematician discovers things.

For engineers, they focus more on how to solve practical problems with scientific results than on figuring out the derivation of theories. Considering the application of mathematical results, often the mathematical models engineers deal with are far more complicated than those taught in mathematics textbook, so it is hard to justify whether certain theories could be used to solve those problems. Using theories in a problem without verifying the satisfaction of all predictions of the theories is very risky in a mathematician’s mind. But for engineers, they care more about the effectiveness of these theories in solving the problem and the rationality of the computed results. Also, due to differences in domain interest, engineers have strong problem-solving skills while scientists/mathematicians are specialized within professional fields and are not good at tackling real-world problems. Moreover, engineers are used to applying certain criteria such as money and time for evaluating outcomes of their work, while scientists/mathematicians hardly evaluate their work by those criteria. For example, scientists had discovered that salt could be separated from water by energy such as electricity. But engineers would consider the high cost of getting distilled water by electricity and doubt its applicability.