The problem we're trying to solve

In general, people do not know how things get engineered. If I asked a person on the street what they thought went into designing a product - how many hours it took to design - whether it works the first time - how and when testing is done - how many people are involved and what their roles are - how the engineers interface with the marketing folks - they would likely not be anywhere close to what actually happens. But it's worse than that: engineering school teaches them to do it very differently than what actually happens after graduation. So all engineering students' assumptions about how engineers get things done are horribly, horribly wrong.

This has a number of ill effects.

• People who might have gone into engineering don’t even consider it.

• It makes professors’ jobs unnecessarily difficult.

• Upon graduation, engineers do not know how to collaborate. Not with marketing people, not with international colleagues, not even with fellow engineers. They do not yet know how to work in modern engineering culture which is highly collaborative.

• Engineering students struggle through their first few years because they don’t understand enough about why they’re there to make it through some really hard courses and we lose more than half our talent.

• When they graduate, they do not have the knowledge to be a functional engineer and their employers must train them. This puts small business at an unnecessary disadvantage, especially in the US. We know something about this because we have provided that training for over a decade.

• Engineering school ends up being an overall difficult experience of “somehow getting through the program” rather than the exciting, highly self-motivating journey it could be.

We really want to fix this.

How we addressed this problem: The first class meeting in your first BUILD course.

Surprise: It’s a cooking show style class.

Two colleagues, one electrical engineer and one mechanical engineer developed a class that addresses this shortcoming in training. We now start all BUILD programs with this class. This is the first class meeting in the BUILD program. Here is how the class goes.

Scene: classroom with students and two instructors, a mechanical engineer and an electrical engineer.

The students show up for class Monday morning expecting a "regular" class. The students are not told what's going on; the "play" just starts. We have an EE who I'll call Eric and an ME who I'll call Mark.

Eric tells Mark the customer has a new project and describes it in a few sentences. Mark asks a lot of questions - what does it need to do, how big, how long does the battery need to last, who is going to be using it, how quickly do they need it, and many more questions. Eric has tentative answers to about half the questions and does not know the answer to the rest. They agree to meet in an hour. End of scene.

Students get a bathroom/snack break

Next, Eric joins Mark in the front of the classroom. He has brought another engineer and they all discuss what they know about the project. They host a Video Teleconference (VTC) with the customer and talk about the project.

So in the first minutes we learn about gathering requirements and specifications and how everything is very vague in the beginning. The VTC ends and the engineers discuss the project. They do a very high level design on the white board in a brainstorming session. They "argue" ideas and put together a plan that includes Eric making a printed circuit board (PCB) and Mark making a box for the prototype. End of scene.

They show up for the next meeting and Eric has his prototype PCB and Mark has his prototype box. This is the "cooking show" part - they have completed these things "off camera" just like a cooking-show baker mixes the ingredients and then immediately pulls out a fully baked cake from the oven. As real world projects go, the PCB doesn't quite fit in the box and they both have to make revisions. They talk about the schedule for the revisions. They schedule a meeting with the customer. End of scene.

They show up at the next meeting with the customer and go over the prototype version - the new board fits perfectly in the new box and the engineers pat themselves on the back. Isn't that cute: they think they're done! But this isn't at all what the customer wants and they have to plan another revision. Humorously presented bummer. End of scene.

They show up for the next meeting along with a test engineer and head of manufacturing department. This meeting is a design review. The customer plays with the new prototype and declares it perfect. Eric goes through the schematic and other engineers comment on the circuit making a lot of constructive suggestions. The same thing happens when Mark presents the box. We hear about adding ESD protection, strain relief, and other things that are not traditionally taught in school that engineers typically and painfully learn through on the job experience. The test engineer explains why this product will be too expensive to test and gives them ideas how to improve the design. The head of manufacturing explains how this product is not practical for manufacture and explain what changes need to be made before it can be mass produced. End of scene.

Mark and Eric now meet by themselves and go through the list of suggestions, one by one deciding between "Harry suggested that we ... this is a great idea and I'll make this change" and "Oscar suggested that we ... While I see why he is suggesting this, I don't think we should do it at this time because..." End of scene.

In the next meeting they have what they think is the finished product. The marketing guy is in the meeting. I probably don't need to tell you what happens here. Product testers are also in the meeting :). Rats! Another iteration?!?!?!

The class time is now over.

So that is the idea. In an hour, we're teaching what it looks like to be an engineer. How collaboration works. What design reviews look like. That things don't work the first time. That it's OK to fail and how to get past that. That you have to work with non engineers and maybe it's a good idea to bring them in early in the project instead of waiting until the end and having to redo everything. And how, after all this work, you get a really wonderful product.

This has been a very successful class. A number of students have told me this is the most valuable of our classes. It teaches the culture of engineering and how things actually get done. Employers have praised it as well. Students feel much better after seeing this because they were taught in school that failure is bad and that it should work the first time and that they should be able to work independently (otherwise they are told they are cheating). Ouch, it hurts for me to even think about it. We really need to fix all this.

The first lesson in the K-12 Mentor Training Program, Cooking Show Style

Let’s also take a look at how this is done in the K-12 Mentor Training Program which has different goals.

Institutionalized step-by-step programs will be replaced with customized curriculum developed by the Early Learning Mentors (ELMs) teaching the program. As part of the training program, the ELMs will learn how to design and teach exercises that satisfy students’ curiosity and questions rather than following step-by-step institutionalized exercises. They will learn to quickly develop curriculum which will be of strong interest to their particular students. We will do this by first showing them how our most successful exercises were developed in cooking-show style, followed by facilitated development of example projects followed by the ELMs developing two exercises on their own with peer review, concluded by full development of these exercises ready for use with their students. When they complete the program, they will be armed with two completed exercise and the talent to develop future exercises. All exercises developed during this training will be published and made available freely.

Much of this program is taught via example-exercise-practice-feedback. The examples are often done cooking-show style. We will explain how the cooking-show teaching style works by way of example.

Cooking Show Style teaching

This example describes how one of the Fairfax County Title I mentorship programs resulted in the learning of algebra. Please imagine yourself in the Mentor training program sitting in the middle of the classroom.

The “play” begins with with two children coming to a teacher asking how magnets work. She begins by answering in the “standard way” explaining that each magnet has a north pole and south pole and like poles repel and unlike poles attract. She hands them magnets and lets them play with them and fill out a chart of attraction and repulsion.

We then skip to the next class. The kids come and ask another question, “We went home and played with the magnets and showed them to our parents, brother, and friends. But we want to know how they work. Why do they repel and attract?”

The teacher tells them that is hard question that she doesn't know the answer. She explains that it is a good question and she will try to find the answer.

We then see her doing a web search and not finding an answer. She then sends an email to the BUILD Program. A response comes matching her to a BUILD Mentor who then comes to class to answer the question.

The mentor explains that there are two things they need to know to understand how magnets work. They already know the first one – attraction and repulsion. He explains that no has figured out why this is true – we've just observed that it always seems to happen. Maybe one of the students in this room will be the first person to figure it out! The second thing is that when someone is moving very fast, they appear to be smaller to someone standing still than they do to the person moving. This is called relativity and a man named Albert Einstein figured this out in 1905. When was that? That's when your grandparents' grandparents were in school. If you'll trust me on these two things, I can explain how magnets work. It'll take about 20 minutes. Is that OK?

The students say yes and we now cut to the end of the class. The mentor asks the students if they have understood and they say yes. He then lets them know that this is the basis for how everything magnetic works such as a motor and demonstrates a motor. They then ask if he will show them how to design the motor and he tells them that that requires something called algebra and when they learn algebra in a few years, he will come back and tell them.

We now cut to the next class when the teacher asks them how their weekend was and asks them if they have any questions. The students ask, “Will you teach us algebra?”

The teacher taught them a little bit of algebra and they asked the mentor to come back. He did and he taught them the next level. He also mentioned in passing that the way to learn something very deeply is to teach it. We then cut to the next class when the students ask their teacher if she would set up a class where they could teach the link between magnetism, relativity, and motors.

That is the end of the play. We conclude by noting that this play is not fiction. This is what happened in one of the mentoring programs at Belvedere Elementary School in 2022. We’re going to foster this.

Summary: What’s in this for you?

We teach STEM teachers how to develop material that is of particular interest to their students. They will not just be giving students a set of step-by-step instructions developed by others. Rather, they will present things they developed. They will trade visits with other teachers.

Wow - if you’re still reading this far, click here for more information on the K-12 program and its philosophy.