Education of engineers

Technical universities have a key role in the education of engineers (so that they can work on modelling and simulation) as well as in research and development. In fact, the universities education role is absolutely fundamental for the future... 

The editors would like to thank the participants in the 2006 IMAPS Fuel Cell Advanced Technical Workshop for their support and dedication to the education of engineers and professionals working in the electronic areas of fuel cell research and development. Without their efforts this book would not have been possible. 

The three major qualifying projects best reflected the new educational philosophy. The sufficiency project demonstrated a student s familiarity with several related areas within the arts and humanities and the successful development of an integrating theme as expressed in a major paper, performance, or creative output. This early appreciation for the importance of right brain development in the education of engineers and scientists reflected the notion of the technological humanist, and resulted in a rich production of remarkably creative works. 

The military in France set up the first schools for engineers in faci artillery schools were attached to the garrisons at Metz and Strasbourg ar< 1689. These were reformed and supplemented in 1729 but it was not until that a school exclusively devoted to the education of engineers was found France — the Ecole du Gdnie at Mdziires. 

An increasingly broad skill set is required to avoid commodification (work being outsourced). This means education of engineers needs to be changed to supply students with these skills, and practicing engineers need to maintain and broaden their skills. 

These three factors served to encourage die development of the field and at the same time served to define the field itself. The increased prevalence of technology and medical instrumentation in hospitals meant that hospital organizations had to develop ways to take care of these devices. With this rapid proliferaticm of what were primarily electrical devices in the vicinity of the patient, some assurance of the electrical safety of the patient needed to be provided. Finally, the skills, training, and education of engineers and technologists who were to become involved in these activities needed to be vetted. 

The mountain school at Kongsberg was closed when the university was founded in 1811 and its mineral and book collection transferred to the Kongelig Frederiks Universitet (Royal Frederick s University or the University in Christiania). Only 20 candidates were educated in the period in which the school was in operation. The education of candidates for the mining industry was continued at the university until 1910. But this early education of engineers was not expanded to other fields at the university. Instead separate technical schools were established in the German tradition. The majority at the university wanted to keep the applied sciences out so that the professors could concentrate... 

We began by examining the sources of advice from industry that reflected on the needs for the education of engineering students. The input typically was in the form of lists that industrial spokesmen and regulatory bodies had developed to summarize the desired attributes of engineers— that they should know the fundamentals, act ethically, communicate effectively, etc. hi this format, the lists conveyed the needs, but not the rationale for the needs. As such, they did not have their desired influence. When we tried to synthesize these lists , we observed that they were driven by a more basic and rational need, that is, the reason society needs engineers in the first place. 

As stated in Chaps. 1 and 2, the overall goals of the CDIO approach are explicitly to improve the education of engineering students, and implicitly to educate more engineers. The explicit statement of the goals is— To educate students who are able to ... 

In the education of engineers, a passion for quantification and the application of numbers evolves. Engineers become comfortable with statistical measurements and expect things to be measured. Engineering texts still quote Lord Kelvin who wrote the following over 100 years ago ... 

Rosenstein, Study of a Profession, II-ll, 11-15. Rosenstein found inspiration an essay by Lynn White Jr. that called for an erasure of the two cultures divide and for the aristocracy of humanism. Lynn White Jr., Humanism and the Education of Engineers, in Studies of Courses and Sequences in Humanities, Fine Arts and Social Sciences for Engineering Students, EDP Humanities Subcommittee, ed. (Los Angeles Department of Engineering, UCLA, 1963), 39-54. 

Jonassen, D., Strobel, J. 6c Lee, C. B. (2006) Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering Lessons for Engineering Educators.of Engineering Education, 95 (2), 139-151. 

All this is purported not to affect the quality of education. Even if this were so, the drive to maximize research income at minimum cost does affect the education of engineering students. Research has really become just one type of machine within the university factory. Its primary purpose is to provide a product (research papers in this case) at minimum cost. The cost is kept low by paying graduate students and post-doctoral employees as little as possible and by experimenting as much as possible on computers, rather than in the field or in the physical laboratory. The students and post-docs are considered first as cost units and only secondly as young people who came to the university for higher education. The implications of this are described in greater detail below. 

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