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10.09

K-12 Engineering Education: A Personal Perspective
By Gordon Day

Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, I had an excellent precollege engineering education. I was also very lucky to have an outstanding high school math teacher. Those two bits of good fortune mostly offset a mediocre precollege science education, and gave me the tools to succeed in a very competitive college engineering program. All of that happened decades ago.

I’ve thought about my experiences frequently since the National Academy of Engineering released its new report on Engineering in STEM Education, discussed in the article by John Platt in this issue of Today’s Engineer. Aside from the report’s tortured attempt to distinguish between the “T” and “E” in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education, it provides some useful insights and makes some good recommendations. I like the three principles they recommend for K-12 engineering education — a focus on design, the integration of engineering topics with science and math, and the development of engineering “habits of mind,” a term coined by AAAS nearly twenty years ago. The seven recommendations provide some useful ideas, but five of the seven are for research. From my perspective, it’s less that we need research and more that we need to figure out ways to provide young people with the engineering experiences that we already know to be helpful.

My precollege engineering experience didn’t occur in school, but in growing up on a family farm, where basic engineering processes occurred almost daily. Need a gate, big enough to let a combine pass through, but strong enough to keep cattle confined? Conceive it. Identify the type and general properties. Design it. Decide on the details: the exact shape, dimensions, and opening mechanism, a material that is light enough and strong enough, and a structure that will be rigid and durable. Then build it. Do all of that without textbooks or equations, but from observations of what has worked elsewhere and in other applications. Call it intuitive engineering, if you like.

The opportunity could just as easily have involved plumbing or electricity. Or it might have involved taking apart problematic machinery to see why it was failing and rebuilding it better — “reverse engineering” it. To be sure, these “engineering” experiences are much less complex than designing communications systems or bridges, but the processes are the same.

When I arrived at the University of Illinois as a freshman, I discovered that there were many students with backgrounds similar to mine in the college of engineering, and the faculty had figured out some indicators for success. If you could do the class work, and your background included practical experience, be it on a farm or similar environment, or through hobbies — many of the engineers of my era were amateur radio operators, audiophiles or driveway mechanics — you had a very good chance of being invited to work in a university research laboratory. One of my classmates later became famous for his work in the manufacture of semiconductor materials, a process carried out in vacuum. He likes to recall that he first learned vacuum technology growing up on a dairy farm.

So we know quite a bit about the life experiences that helped prepare many of today’s engineers, especially those who are now late in their careers. Some of it occurred in elementary and high schools, but much of it occurred outside of school. The question is: how can we replicate those experiences for young people of the 21^st century?

I’ve been very impressed with the technology competitions that are now available for students. Why shouldn’t schools invest as much in these kinds of activities as they do for music, debate or (dare I say it?) athletic competitions. I’ve also been impressed with the benefits students gain from internships and part-time work for employers who understand the value of practical, hands-on experience, not just observation. Putting the “E” in K-12 STEM shouldn’t be limited to the classroom.

We do need to work on STEM education in the United States, all four letters. We do need to attract more young people into the field. But looking backwards a few decades may provide us with more and better ideas than more research.

Gordon W. Day, Ph.D., is 2009 IEEE-USA President. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, and the Institute of Physics (UK) and a Past President of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society. In 2005, he was an IEEE Congressional Fellow, serving as a science advisor to Senator Jay Rockefeller.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.