Teaching modern engineering
Our BUILD courses and associated projects are strategically designed to reflect how engineering is practiced in the current century – through collaborative, multidisciplinary teamwork. It is a growing consensus that mainstream education is falling short of effectively training engineers for this reality, and we're getting our butts kicked.
As an example, as their junior-year project, students create and perfect a complex Pick and Place machine using real world PID motion control, serious mechanics, optics, control theory, low level embedded control, high level system software, and project management skills. Through this experience, which includes design reviews and places a focus on time management, they become adept at handling serious, complex projects. This project is designed to put into practice what they're learning in their academic classes. By designing, building, using, and perfecting a rudimentary pick-and-place machine, they will be much better equipped to design a manufacturable board. This is not your typical three-hour lab class, it is a threaded training program that provides continuity throughout the student’s curriculum.
We need to be teaching how to learn, not just to perform specific tasks. We don’t want to teach students to program one specific microprocessor, but rather use a specific microprocessor to teach them how to develop their craft. This change is imperative if the US hopes to keep up in the modern world with the rapid pace of technological advancement which can render newly acquired skills obsolete by the time they get to graduation.
We need to be teaching fundamentals and theory and how to apply them to tomorrow’s challenges, rather than simply how to follow instructions to solve the problems of today.
The BUILD learning philosophy has been described as follows:
Give a person a potato and they eat for a day. Teach a person to grow potatoes and they eat for a lifetime. But they have to eat potatoes forever.
Teach a person agricultural science and they will eat what they want whenever they want.
The BUILD philosophy is to learn how to develop agricultural science.
Whether you are a fan of it or not, Artificial Intelligence (AI) now plays an important role in engineering. The BUILD Program does not consider the use of AI cheating, we consider its lack of use as foolish. Of course it needs be used with great care and caution and we use it prudently and productively.
Summary: What’s in this for you?
After going through the BUILD program you will be experienced working in the modern engineering environment, knowing how to work in a team environment to create engineering models, prototypes, and get things manufactured both domestically and in the international market.
