Lösen wir im nächsten Seminar, Workshop oder Training doch auch lieber ein reales Problem anstatt ein Team von 5 Erwachsenen eine Turm aus Papier, Schere und Radiergummi bauen zu lassen.
We try to show students that engineering is a career where we solve REAL, and IMPORTANT problems for REAL people… it isn’t just silly, made-up problems like pick up this ping-pong ball and place it over there before the other team does”. Unfortunately, the next speaker at the workshop, an excellent professor in a large Canadian University, stood up to describe his class’ project over the past year… you guessed it… it was “design a device to pick up a ping-pong ball and place it on the platform over there using this box of stuff”. Ouch…So what’s so wrong with the “box-of-junk” design projects for student engineers? After all, they give students experience with teamwork, they force them to employ basic physics in solving a problem, and to use limited resources to make something work, all of which are useful skills. They also reward creativity and attention to detail, both good attributes for future engineers.Unfortunately, I believe they subtly tell would-be-engineers that the practice of engineering is silly and irrelevant. Which of us actually remembers the details of our first-year box-of-junk project anyway?
