Linking Theory and Practice - Part 2 of 2

One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to link theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.

Community-Centeredness

I consider this dimension as the newest to me and the one that I have spent most of the time working on and the one I most enjoyed. This dimension encourages both students and faculty to learn from one another, and fosters the development identity as a profession in class and out of class.

A statement that I always like to emphasize in my teaching philosophy is to state explicitly in the teaching philosophy document that I would encourage the community-centeredness in developing the systems perspective in my students. Since this was my first time to interact with students at this capacity as a TA, I found myself confused and need to learn with them in so many occasions. I believe that there is no harm of showing that you are confused even though some students do not feel comfortable with that. However, I found that most of the students learn a lot when we are working together on a problem. I am afraid that this feeling would vanish after a while when I start to master the material and the best way to present it, and this is why I should state this in my teaching philosophy that I must show the students that I am learning with them. Personally, and keeping the systems perspective in mind, there are always new angles to look at things when thinking holistically. I would consider this fitting well with community-centered lens in the HPL framework.

During my office hours, it was clear to me that “people learn differently.” Unlike regular office hours for other classes where students approach the TA with their questions, I tried to generate during my office hours an environment that is very similar to the lab environment, in which students sit down on a computer and the TA approaches them when they have questions. It is important to emphasize here that they still had the freedom to work on their own, individually or with their teams, to show up and leave whenever they wanted, and to browse the internet and do any other side activities they wanted. Interestingly, most of the students who showed up did so for the entire period of office hours of two hours, asked questions all the time, were less stressed, and rarely, or never, did they do any other side activities. I think this is because they showed up for a single purpose of completing their tasks; they had the motivation.

Some of the students had team meetings during the office hours and were asking questions as a team. It seemed that their team was well established and they were doing collaborative work very nicely together. Some other students were working individually and they benefited well from the one-to-one interaction. I have to point here that I did not have the key solutions for the homeworks that they were working on, and found myself working with them to solve the problems together. This is a very key point. I think not having the final answers helped a lot in generating more a community-centered learning environment where students and the TA were learning from one another. I felt that students learned a lot from the techniques they were seeing me using to tackle the problems. I found most of them giving me ideas to solve the problems, and they were very good ideas. In the beginning I felt that they lost their trust in me because they felt that I did not have the answer, but that feeling disappeared immediately when they saw me working on the problem with them. It was a mixed feeling of confusion, experimenting with the problems we had, and eventually exploring. I was sure that they learned a lot from these sessions. Compared to other situations where I had the key solutions before the students approached me, I am confident now that this approach of teaching is far more effective. Before this experience, I used to rush to give the students all the details of the problem to get to the solution. But now I think this effective approach is more community-, learner-, and knowledge-centered. A challenge remains on how to generate the same atmosphere of making the students “think” when I already know the answers to their question.

This dimension required me to develop confidence. In fact, some of the students in their feedback to me mentioned that they enjoyed this approach. A question that remains on this dimension is how to maintain this attitude toward teaching without getting bored doing the same thing over and over again. One professor whom I interviewed answered this question by telling me to do new things each time. He himself mentioned to me that he even went to sit down in a class to learn the theory of relativity and then teach it to his students in a new class that he has developed.

I am generally pleased with the feedback that the students provided to me on the course evaluation feedback. I believe the theory we learn about engineering education should be linked to practice.

Linking Theory and Practice - Part 1 of 2

One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to linking theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.

As a student, I always enjoyed seeing the relationships between seemingly unrelated topics in the engineering curriculum. I also enjoyed discovering these relationships in the field as a practicing engineer; the relationships between different engineering and non-engineering disciplines. And now as teaching assistant for the freshman engineering class at Purdue, I would like to transfer this important skill to my students.

I am a Teaching Assistant (TA) for a freshmen course in engineering at Purdue. Even though I am considered as a millennial, I feel that my students learn and interact, or prefer to interact while learning, somehow differently from me. But I still feel comfortable with all the situations I have encountered thus far with them. In fact, the framework described in A Generational Approach to Understanding Students by Coomes and DeBard emphasizes that “the variance within groups is always greater than the variance between groups.” I fully agree with this statement in that we might have different perspectives on teaching and learning, or on different ethnic and cultural issues, but we, the students and myself, are still more flexible and willing to adapt to our differences between ourselves than to adapt to the differences with an older generation. This can be partly because we share the same experience of expressing ourselves as being different from the older generations, and because we, as a generation, have to interact with the same larger “cultural force” that is more different from us.

In my two posts on this topic, I will discuss my growth and teaching experience along two of the four How People Learn (HPL) dimensions: the Assessment-Centered, and Community-Centered dimensions. The other two dimensions that are not discussed are the Knowledge-Centered and the Learner-Centered dimensions. I also asked the students to provide feedback for me on my performance as experienced by them in each one of the four dimensions. The feedback is not included in the posts; some of my reflections on it are included though.

Assessment-Centeredness

I had a math professor who used to say, “Let’s make a reality check!” By this he means that he wants to assess our understanding to the concepts that he has just explained in the classroom and during the lecture. He is an old but intelligent professor. To bridge the gap between us and him, he usually gave examples of so many applications that we use in our daily life that utilize the concepts he explains. For example, he gave examples on how the Fourier Transform and the Fast Fourier Transform are everywhere in our digital age, and how these abstract mathematical concepts found their way to applications in fascinating devices like the iPods and the like.

In the beginning, as a student and as an instructor, I always undervalued grades as a way to assess understanding. Also, in the beginning of the semester, I hated when students asked about grades as I wanted them to focus on understanding the materials. In addition to that, the structure of the course I taught did not allow adding more burdens on either the students or the instructors for more grading. I believe that there are many ways to assess understanding.

For example, I once had a professor who assesses understanding in a very interesting and effective way. Contrary to the conventional approach, he showed up in the beginning of the semester and wrote in large letters on the board “No questions!” And between “No” and “questions” in the previous sentence there was the word “dumb”- No dumb questions! That is a call for challenge. Engineers like to be challenged. This is why they are in this profession. They do not like to be in a math class where the professor quizzes them to assess their understanding, or in large classroom where they communicate their Yes-No responses to a question for the sake of assessing their understanding. They like to talk about what they do because they like doing it. This is why instructors should give them the chance to talk, and this is why instructors should challenge them to talk. They should talk beyond the Yes-No response if an instructor wants to assess their understanding of a design concept or idea. Of course, there are no such things as dumb questions.

Also, a crucial part of achieving my personal philosophy of developing a systems perspective of engineering with the students is the use of challenging take-home, open world exams. My observation from grading exams is that students who get an A in an exam are not necessarily the best. That is, they were able to absorb the assigned material very well, and achieved the learning objectives of that exam, but they were not exceedingly excellent in going beyond the expectations, which is the unique characteristic of an A-student. (The nature of these exams, however, is understandable for a huge class like this!) Take-home, open world exams simulate the real world, and require the students to think holistically, given the relaxed exam conditions, and thus achieving the purpose of developing the systems perspective.

In addition to take-home exams, reality check of key concepts should be made. From my personal experience I found that pop quizzes that ask about key concepts are the best in assessing students’ understanding of key concepts. Quizzes should be application-oriented to see if students can really apply an abstract concept to a given situation in an application, which is similar to what an engineer would face in reality. I would consider this fitting well with assessment-centered lens in the HPL framework.

Another experience I had that is related to this dimension was during grading. Grading and giving feedback might be time consuming but it is really important. It was difficult for me to just give the student that her or his answer was wrong, and I felt all the time that it was important to provide feedback on the graded material. This feedback may involve clarifying or explaining the mistake or the fact. I think that despite the fact that this was a time consuming process, my hope in the beginning of the semester was that the students will benefit from that. And they did. Most of them did. In the past, I noticed improvements in the performance of individual students by considering the comments that are in the form of the feedback.

Because I still do not value numerical grades too much, I structured my questions in the HPL evaluation feedback I asked the students to complete for me around feedback that I have provided to them on graded homeworks and exams. That said, however, my understanding of this assessment-centeredness dimension made me believe in the importance of returning graded homeworks quickly to the students, as they seem to need this.

In Context

With so many suggestions to improve the engineering education process which include integrating (often times called networking) the curriculum, more focus on design and less focus on the engineering sciences, and implementing more of the project-based learning activities, with all that, the discussion on educating engineers the history of engineering and technology seems to be of less interest.

We all like stories, and humans are story tellers. The origin from which all the suggestions to improve the engineering education mentioned above is the effort to make engineering in academia match as much as attainable engineering as practiced in the field. For example, the focus on project-based learning activities is an effort to make the classroom-lab setting (although not necessarily the best environment to teach engineering) match projects as implemented in reality. So, it’s all about context. The history of engineering and technology is no different in this sense.

When one thinks about it, a certain engineering concept is basically an abstraction, or an ideal, of a complex situation that some person comprehended at some point. This abstract concept seems to be the middle point between two stages: the first stage is the complex phenomenon that once was observed and then was abstracted, and the final stage is when this abstract concept is taken to another complex situation to be applied to. The demand for a technical curriculum to teach as many abstract concepts as possible leaves no place for teaching the context in which a certain concept was abstracted, or, in other words, the history of the discovery.

What is often neglected as well is the fact that engineering itself is practiced in context. The real world provides more context than the academic exercises, and therefore the need to teach history (and context) seems to be more urgent. Engineering is practiced to achieve the needs of a society; it does not exist for its sake but, rather, in the social and cultural contexts that motivates, and constrains, the practice of the profession.

Professor Walter Vincenti, professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University, is the author of the book What Engineers Know and How They Knew It. The title glimpses to the fact that there is a context for what engineers know, so why not teaching it? Professor Vincenti is reported to describe the academic community’s view of engineering as “an exotic and incomprehensible activity that goes on ‘over there’.” Teaching the history of engineering and technology can better prepare future engineers to practice engineering in its real context: the society which it serves.

Images of an Engineer

I enjoy reading Henry Petroski. In Remaking the World, Petroski relates the story of a friend of a friend who nicknamed him “Steinmetz.” This friend was referring to Charles Steinmetz. The parents of this friend, who himself was inclined toward business and politics and not at all toward science and technology, believed that Steinmetz was “the embodiment of American engineering.”

Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was born in Breslau, Germany in 1865. He earned a doctorate in mathematics, and immigrated to America in 1889. He joined the General Electric Company, and drew upon his strong mathematical physics background to solve practical problems for which he brought patents for GE. In addition to his employment with GE, Steinmetz joined the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and published papers that showed that he was in the forefront of his field. One of his many contributions to electrical engineering was the hysteresis loss law that is used to calculate power loss in transformers. He was also the one who introduced and developed the use of complex numbers for calculations involving alternating current (AC). (I was personally surprised to know that he was the first person who introduced it, as this is a powerful tool in electrical engineering for people who are familiar with the field.)

Aside from his ingenuity, Steinmetz was an eccentric person; the combination of the two characteristics made it easy to his mention in the newspapers and popular magazines. GE’s public relations department helped also with this publicity and promoted him as the first who generated the power of lightning in the laboratory as “the very personification of modern electrical development.” Petrsoki commented on this popularity that it gave “the cold, abstract, and sometimes feared new technology a human embodiment.”

With this publicity, lots of photos of Steinmetz in different life arenas were distributed. One of the most famous ones is this picture of him with Albert Einstein. I would like to quote Petrsoki’s comment on this picture:



“The father of relativity stands tall, formal, and self-assured beside the short and stooping, hand-in-pocket and smoking, rumpled and scowling figure who looks to be, ambivalently, both leaning toward the famous scientist and pushing him back with an elbow … In it [Steinmetz] seems complemented only by his standing next to a Nobel laureate, as if the engineer needed a scientist to lean upon. The photograph’s semiotics reinforce the stereotype of the engineer vis-à-vis the scientist, of engineering versus science. In this picture the great engineer Steinmetz is reduced to a caricature of himself; by implication, his achievements is diminished relative to that of the giant he stands beside.

“The Einstein-Steinmetz photo is actually as false as are its implications for the relationship between science and engineering. The great scientists and the great engineer never did pose one-on-one, as they are presented in this photo.”

The photo turned to be fabricated from a group photo that was taken in the occasion of a Radio Cooperation of America-sponsored demonstration of transoceanic telegraph transmission at New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1921.



This is, however, the photo that is most popular for Steinmetz who is considered by some “the embodiment of American engineering.”

I believe this story shows how the public perceives engineers and scientists, and, somehow the relationship between engineering and science. Steinmetz was involved later in his life in a distinguished period of service on the Schenectady Board of Education.

Bibliography:
Petroski, Henry (1997). Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The Challenge of Change – Stimulating Engineers with the Spirit of Innovation

Engineering involves thinking. Innovation involves change. Innovators are critics; they think critically to stimulate change.

The spirit of seeing a solution of a problem to be ubiquitous in everyday life acts as a driver, an attracting pole, if you wish, pushing the innovator toward finding a solution for the problem that he or she sees. The question I’m trying to answer in this post is how well are engineers being educated to be critics, or, similarly, how well are engineer being educated to be innovators.

Innovators can not be called pessimists because of their continuous search for shortcomings in what they see. On the contrary, Petroski describes them as “supreme optimists, for they pursue innovation with the belief that they can improve the world, or at least the things of the world.” [1]

Educating future engineers to be innovators requires educating them to be risk takers, and, more importantly, critical thinkers. Someone may ask: does this also require, in some sense, equipping them with the spirit of entrepreneurship? It is not true that engineers should be businessmen whom ultimate goal is to turn ideas into money. The dilemma of whether the job of an engineer is to turn an idea into innovation or to turn an idea into money is an interesting one. This is because it depends on our understanding of whether innovation and money are two faces of the same coin or not. In a short, nice read book, published not too far ago by an aerospace engineer called Thomas Hanson, entitled Engineering Creativity, Hanson describes the ideal designer [2]. In addition to having a tough hide and a healthy ego, because creativity involves many more failures than successes, Hanson says that “truly driven, life-long inventors such as Edison, Steinmetz, and Kettering are much less easily understood, because their thinking tends to be unconventional, and their values and motivations are quite different from those of most people.” Talking about Edison, in particular, Hanson mentions that “based solely on the list of his inventions, Edison should have been the richest man in the world, but he was a very poor businessman. I suspect this was because money as such didn’t much interest him. To Edison, money was apparently just another tool.”

In so many ways, I believe teaching engineering is being similar to teaching art. I attended recently an art exhibition in which the displayed artifacts were works of students in an art class. The task assigned to the students was to first read the same poem (which described a generic painful case), then visit a cancer hospital, and finally reflect on what they have seen with connections to the poem by means of artistic artifacts. As an engineer in that exhibition, I understood that the poem served the same purpose of that of the Request for Proposal we give to our students in typical engineering design projects. The two teaching philosophies of the art class and an engineering class is almost similar: given a task, generate an outcome. The art students were not there in the exhibition to talk about their works, but rather the works were eloquently speaking for themselves.

I know that an exhibition is not the very right place where an engineer’s work should reside; engineers products are around us, and they speak by fulfilling the functions they should be fulfilling. Although being almost similar in the teaching philosophy, I believe that the element that was present in the art class and was absent in engineering classes is the challenge to think critically. In the art class, the students were challenged to see the hidden characters in the cases and stories that they saw, and then to expose them in reflective art.

I believe the reason for this shortcoming in engineering classes is the criteria by which the end product, compared to the art class, is being judged. Assessing engineering design in classroom settings continue to be a challenge, whereas for an art class, students’ works being in display in an exhibition is quite sufficient. Engineering creativity is different from artistic creativity. Hanson writes, “Creativity without objective judgment to guide its course rarely results in anything useful. One of the great obstacles to effective inventing is the very human tendency to fall in love with one’s invention, and for this reason designers must be careful not to let emotion and ego wrap their judgment.”

Brilliant engineering designers as Hanson describes them do not fall in love with their designs. I am not trying to say that art designers do fall in love with their work just because we tend to think of them being more emotional, but I really appreciate the approach of encouraging critical thinking in art schools. I wish to see one day engineers being taught to design in the same way artists are being taught to design; more specifically, to be reflective, critical thinkers. I wish engineering educators could rise up to this challenge of change.

Hanson describes the most brilliant and creative engineer with whom he worked with, who never attended college, saying, “I believe one of his major strengths was that his thinking had never been channeled into conventional grooves,” orderliness which is a result of traditional scientific and engineering education that inhibits creative thinking.


References:
[1] Petroski, Henry (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
[2] Hanson, Thomas F. (1997). Engineering Creativity. Newhall, CA: T. F. Hanson.

Engineering as Hypothesis

In science, theories are constructed to predict whatever it is that science studies. As long as tests of a particular scientific hypothesis show that the conclusions of that hypothesis hold true, then the hypothesis reaches the status of the fact. In To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski, he gives the example of the scientific hypothesis that "honeybees always build their hives with hexagonal cells." This became a fact since we have seen this over and over again. Until somebody comes to say that they saw bees making octagonal cells, that hypothesis of hexagonal cells will remain a fact.

Eloquently, Petroski carries this argument over to engineering. He says that engineering design in some sense is similar to scientific hypothesis in that the engineer's hypothesis is his or her assemblage of joints and metals, parts and components, ideas and concepts, to come up with a final artifact, that he or she claims its "truthfulness." But this time the testing procedure is different. If we are talking about a bridge, the "engineer's truthfulness" of the "bridge hypothesis" is only tested to hold true if it never collapses, and remains to carry traffic year after year without trouble. Below is a picture of the San Fransisco bridge 50th. anniversary (24 May 1987), where hundreds of thousands of people are celebrating this "amazing hypothesis!"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/parenting/detail?entry_id=71230

In this sense, engineers' universe is created by them, as opposed to the scientists' universe. In the process of engineering, the engineer takes on and off the hat of the artist and the analyst, creating the universe of possibilities that only he or she can dream of, and then checking for realities using sophisticated analytical tools. An example of that (and continuing on the bridge theme for civil engineering) is the beam.

"The essence of the idea of a beam," Petroski writes, "is that it spans some space and resists bending or deflection by forces acting transverse to its long dimension." We can see how the engineer's universe has been all of sudden created by this beam, spanning a dimensional space, and we can anticipate the kind of analysis that can follow afterwards.

Petroski gives more examples like the floor underneath us right now; this is an example of a "proven engineer's hypothesis," since the floor is not falling in the building where we are in right now!

Petroski concludes that we might see a faulty analysis that an engineer has undertaken. "That engineers make mistakes is forgivable; that they catch them is imperative." The fact that we have tremendous analytical powers in modern engineering may be good, but it's also misleading as to what engineering really is. Design, as an essential part of engineering, represents a giant leap in the human creativity, and sophisticated analysis should follow creative design, especially as designs become more complex with so many interactive parts. The challenge of educating today's engineers is striking the right balance between educating the indispensable attribute of creativity in design (if this is at all a correct statement) and the absolutely necessary ability of assessing design by accurate analysis.

"It is not easy to get a feel for a mammoth structure like a jumbo jet or a suspension bridge by flexing a paint stroke yardstick in one's hand. And the hypothesis that a structure will fly safely through wind and rain can be worth of millions of dollars and hundreds of lives," Petroski writes.

Engineering Artifacts

I try in this post to trace three engineered artifacts that are associated with the man-made transportation systems and that were developed over different periods of human history and in different places in the world. I organized this post so that:

• First, I describe each engineered artifact
• Then, I briefly describe the impact of that engineered artifact
• And finally, I give a description of the presence of this artifacts in the culture in or after which it existed

The three artifacts which I talk about here are:

• Petra, the city, in present Jordan
• The industrial revolution in the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries
• Space exploration in the modern age, the 1950's and beyond

I talk about Petra, the city, in present Jordan, as an engineered artifact, just like any city is. The unique location of Petra allowed it to be the control point for many commercial routs passing through. Its impact on the life of the Nabataeans increased as they mastered controlling the water supply with dams and water conduits, which made the city be a natural oasis in the desert [1].


The treasury of Petra [2].

The Newdigate Prize in 1845 was awarded to John William Burgon's Poem Petra, who referred "to it as the inaccessible city which he had heard described but had never seen:" [1]

"It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!"[1]

Next, the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries produced so many artifacts that changed the landscape of the country, and therefore, the life of its people. It is no wonder how the development of automated machines have allowed access to rivers, canals, roads, and railways which did not exist before.

The impact of the industrial revolution changed the economy; jobs that were traditionally performed by laborers (including kids) were no longer needed [3]. The fact that machines have changed the way we live and move is still present in our daily lives nowadays.


The Iron Bridge, Schropshire, England [4].

Recently, and in the United States, I can talk about the transcontinental network of railroads and highways that required decades of commitments to complete, and the impact it had on the life in the United States in so many ways, but, instead, I would like to talk on space exploration as the new frontier. NASA's former administrator, Dr. Michael Griffin noted in a speech that:

"...the spirit of exploration is something embedded in our human DNA. In a certain sense, this must be true, or the human species would still be confined to East Africa, if it existed at all. And indeed, this genetic trait must lie even deeper than the human species; most members of the animal kingdom range as far and wide as their physical adaptability allows. So, while exploration beyond one’s known habitat is usually difficult and dangerous for an individual, it clearly provides survival value for the species as a whole, in the longer run. And, in the very long run, this may indeed be the single most compelling reason for space exploration."[5]

I will leave it up to you, the reader, to examine the impact and presence of the space exploration in our current days. Dr. Griffin in his speech indicated that, "Carl Sagan captured it nicely when, in his usual droll manner, he noted that if the dinosaurs had had a space program, they would not be extinct."[5]

References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra [Accessed 28 October 2010]
[2] http://www.adventure-travel.org.uk/ASIA/petra.php [Accessed 28 October 2010]
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_Great_Britain_during_the_Industrial_Revolution [Accessed 28 October 2010]
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution [Accessed 28 October 2010]
[5] Griffin, Michael D. (2005) "Remarks for 56th International Astronautical Congress," Fukuoka, Japan.

Some Thoughts

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't care much where ---" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you walk," said the Cat.
"--- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat. "If you only walk long enough."

• The above quote is from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It's not in the reading assignments, and this is not Alice Prof. Pawley. I think this quote describes what this course is all about.
• One thing I heard and found interesting in the past two lectures is to let yourself go where you have not gone before, to places that are new to you, and to patterns of thinking that do not necessarily match yours. I think we will need to challenge what is put in the table from the readings.
• One of my favorite professors once said, "You've learned all what you need for this life in kinder garden." I consider this course to be a little more extra work for this reason!
• I am not a philosopher, and I am not interested in being one, but I read philosophy for pleasure. Ask what does the Ph. stand for in Ph.D.
• I found it useful to decouple teaching morals (ethics) from math, science or more generally thinking to understand the readings. I am not sure if you understand me.
• I also found it useful to decouple talking about teaching techniques (scaffolding, building blocks, etc.) from talking about philosophy of education.
• Three terms you will need to know to be successful in ENE: lenses, unpacking, and scaffolding. For some reason, I keep hearing them very often!
• My problem: In class discussions, I only listen to myself; when others are talking I keep thinking of what I was saying, myself! Do you have the same problem, or is it just me?