Engineering &…

America is experiencing an engineering deficit. Compared to twenty years ago, 20,000 fewer U.S. students now graduate college with engineering degrees. Europe and Asia now graduate 3 to 5 times as many engineers as the U.S. Brent Staples’ recent New York Times editorial identifies a distinct advantage that Japan’s education system has over that of the U.S.: increased collaboration between teachers about what works in the classroom. To reverse this advantage and keep the United States competitive in the global workforce, engineering educators from prominent universities are setting their sights on the K-12 classroom, equipping math and science teachers with tools proven to successfully integrate engineering into their lessons.

One of these resources, the TeachEngineering (TE) digital library (www.teachengineering.com), provides K-12 teachers with hands-on lessons and activities involving science and math concepts in an easily accessible online format. Martha Cyr from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, one of the joint developers of TE, says that

When a teacher goes to the TE site and brings up an activity or lesson, everything is right there. A lot of resource sites for teachers link them to other places where the curriculum looks different and you’re never sure what you’re going to find. With TE, there’s no hop-scotching around.

Learn more about the TeachEngineering digital library in “A Click Away,” an article by Barbara Mathias-Riegel written for ASEE’s award winning PRISM magazine.

Regular users of the EngineeringK12 Center’s outreach program database will now find the collection of K-12 and pre-college engineering, math, science, and technology programs easier to use and convenient to update. By simply registering with the database, outreach program providers will now have access to the new user interface, allowing them to add, edit, and manage listings at anytime. This feature will ensure that the most current information on engineering outreach programs is available to database searchers.

Home to hundreds of listings, the EngineeringK12 Center’s outreach program database is a great resource for parents, teachers, and students to search nationwide for an outreach program that matches their needs. From lesson plans for teachers, to engineering summer camps for students, the database offers a wide variety of programs offered by universities, industry, and government. Registration is only required to add and manage an outreach program in the database. Registration is not required simply to search.

You can register to be an outreach program database user here.

Douglas Kern’s Confessions of an Engineering Washout has been making waves in the blogosphere for over a month now. In the sometimes depressingly accurate article, Kern describes the weeding out of freshman engineers through a labyrinth of problem sets and apathetic TAs. He raises some interesting questions, however: Is the atmosphere in our engineering colleges and universities barring many from succeeding in the field? What is to be done with the current engineering curricula? Sherri Sheppard, now a full professor and member of Stanford’s Design Group, seems to have an answer that may significantly alter how engineering is taught. She has been a pioneer in researching and developing alternatives to the established engineering education canon— in essence learning about learning. One of her ideas is called mechanical dissection, which teaches students the context in which designs are created by having them take apart familiar objects such as bikes or fishing reels and put them back together. In addition to steering class work away from problem sets and into the lab, Sheppard has performed research on how to make underrepresented groups in engineering feel more supported and empowered. Read more about the obstacles women face in engineering, why engineering attracts so few women, and what Sheppard is doing to change it in PRISM, ASEE’s award-winning magazine.