Manisha Kher

I read an article about an engineering college
(Olin)that's turning engineering upside down.
Traditionally all engg students are required to do a
number of math and science courses and then later
they're supposed to apply that knowledge. This college
is starting with projects and then throwing in some
theory. It makes a lot of sense because the students
then have a real interest and need to learn the
theory.

Here are some interesting quotes from the article:
--

Miller (the president) explains the philosophy behind
what he calls the "do and then learn" approach.
"Students start out with an audacious project, which
would in many institutions be heretical, except we do
that deliberately," the amiable 56-year-old executive
says. "Because, after all, when you get hired in a
corporation, that's the first thing that happens to
you: they give you a challenge for which you've not
had the prerequisites. It's all about learning how to
learn. So we do that here from day one."

...

They (i.e the faculty) wanted to determine whether
students have to sit through a barrage of fundamental
courses before designing and building anything at all.
They divided the students into small groups and
assigned them a task: they had eight weeks to design,
build, and demonstrate a pulse oximeter, a medical
instrument clipped onto a patient's finger to
electronically measure pulse rate and blood oxygen
level.

The professors showed the groups a commercial unit and
referred them to relevant patents and other technical
documentation in a step-by-step guided design. The
faculty's plan was to watch carefully as the groups
progressed and discover where and why they failed.
"The problem is, they didn't fail," Miller says. "They
got it to work. This wasn't the highest-quality
fabrication in the world; it was a very crude-looking
circuit board with a lot of transistors. But it
worked. And we said, 'Aha! There's something to this.
You don't need to have prerequisites.' "

Even more revealing, he adds, was the effect the
exercise had on the students. "They now wanted to know
what a transistor is—badly. They now had a sincere,
deep, personal motivation to learn electromagnetic
theory and circuit design. These kids will never
forget the experience they had in that project."

---


The article is here
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3432


Manisha



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