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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.