Engaging Students With Great Problems

The Great Problems Seminars were designed to bring first year engineering students into meaningful contact with current events, societal problems, and human needs. Key learning objectives include: introducing project team work and developing writing and presentation skills. Each seminar has focused on a large global issue: food and hunger, energy and its utilization, health and healthcare delivery, the NAE Grand Challenges. Seminars are co-taught by an interdisciplinary pair: one natural science/engineering instructor and one humanities/social science instructor. The first half of the two-term course sequence explores the depth and breadth of the problem; the second half is devoted to project work. Focus group assessment demonstrates that the GPS courses achieve the original course objectives. Student course evaluations indicate high satisfaction despite requiring significantly more work than traditional first year offerings taught within the disciplines. Comments by former GPS students demonstrate that they value how these courses prepared them for their futures. Introduction Listing the inadequacies of traditional engineering education programs, Edinburgh environmental engineering professor William Turmeau threw down a serious challenge: “Engineering today involves more than the solution of technical problems, more than the design of advanced technological devices, more than the pursuit of pure research, and engineering courses must be reviewed and revised to ensure that engineers, once again, play a role in the wider issues concerning society.” 1 This challenge has been addressed by a series of curricular innovations undertaken by leading institutions of engineering education around the world. Specifically, within the United States, a national trend toward more active, project-based learning in engineering education has been gaining momentum for more than 40 years. A widely publicized illustration of the trend was the establishment in 1997 of the Olin College of Engineering, an institution which promised integrated project work in all four years of its curriculum. Before and since, and in many places besides Olin, promising engineering students have been enticed to attend a variety of innovative technical education programs that promise real-world experience, training in widely applicable communications skills, and an impeccable foundation in the principles of design and professional standards of practice. For example, our institution, a primarily science and engineering school, placed project-based learning at the core of its academic program in the early 1970’s when it redesigned its graduation requirements to include two major projects. One project undertaken within the student’s major field of study is usually completed during the senior year. Another project is usually completed during the junior year, but this one challenges students to work on an interdisciplinary problem located at the interface of science, technology, and societal needs. To better prepare students for a world like Turmeau’s, practical and cross-cultural engineering elements were increasingly incorporated into the interdisciplinary junior-year project experience. After several decades of implementation, a steady state has been achieved in which approximately half of all students (about 400 students each year) now satisfy this requirement by devoting one academic term to work at one of 23 project centers located around the world. Initiated at our new President’s request in 2005, faculty-led conversations about the first year educational experience resulted in critical observations about the overall program of projectbased learning. Despite the strong institutional consensus that project-based learning is an essential component of what makes our college unique and successful, extensive project work typically has not been available to first year students. Moreover, traditional coursework in the first year had not adequately prepared all students for their project work in the junior and senior years. A multidisciplinary task force resolved that a new first year experience needed to be developed at our campus, to bring meaningful problem-based project work into the earliest stage of a college student’s education. Focus on the importance of the first year is not limited to engineering education. Many colleges have developed new first-year programs designed to smooth the transition from high school to college. Some focus on study skills and transition issues, others use learning communities to build a network of social support for the academic mission, and yet others build first-year seminars connecting students with faculty research interests. Among engineering education programs, however, freshmen seminars typically focus on bringing engineering and design into the curriculum earlier, largely to spur student motivation, retention, and assistance in choosing a major. These first year engineering seminars often introduce ethics and professional responsibility and cover some study survival skills. Intimacy of small group settings is preferred to provide student-faculty interaction. In rare cases, the seminars may have a liberal arts or interdisciplinary backdrop. Stengel, for example, describes a Princeton seminar on space flight which exposes liberal arts students to details of technology and engineering students to societal impacts of technology. Tryggvason and Apelian have argued that the engineer of the 21 century will be redefined. Advances in information technology have made all information available to everyone everywhere with almost infinite speed and ease. A paradigm shift in education is indicated. Now, rather than merely to deliver content, our task as educators is to challenge students to work on real problems, to develop their own capacity to find the knowledge that they need when they need it, and to understand the difference between posing a trivial or dead-end question and posing a fruitful one. With these criteria in mind, the Great Problems Seminars were initiated in the fall of 2007. The three main imperatives that influenced the course design process were: (1) to engage first year students with modern problem-solving oriented toward social and global issues; (2) to introduce the real-world experience of working in teams; and (3) to develop each student’s writing and presentation skills. The faculty who developed the seminars consequently focused on three key principles: 1. Engage first-year students with current events, societal problems, and human needs; 2. Require first year students to perform/produce critical thinking, information literacy, and evidence-based writing; and 3. Devote time and attention to nurture the development of professional skills including effective teamwork, time management, organization, and personal responsibility. Engagement is the primary goal for the seminars. Seminars are therefore defined by problems, not by disciplines; they are interdisciplinary, not multidisciplinary. The seminar model was conceived neither to be a survey of engineering fundamentals nor an overview of how science and engineering disciplines address real problems. Great Problems cannot be adequately framed within a single discipline that offers a single solution approach; by definition they will be solved only by integrating and negotiating among many small solutions coming from disparate directions.