Promoting Technological Literacy By Utilizing Pictures And Recreated Artifacts

Today's students study and understand today's technologies. Few look back into history to study and understand the technologies from the past. Current engineering and engineering technology students study how to use modern tools to solve modern problems. Little do they realize that engineers and technologists from the past did the very same thing. The only difference was the type, variety, and number of tools they had to work with. Typically, they were far less sophisticated and complex. In many cases, they were actually quite crude. However, they served their purpose and worked. Problems were solved, ideas were turned into inventions, and dreams became innovations. Ironically, we struggle with many of the same problems today that were actually solved in the past. It is the understanding of past technologies and connecting them to current ones, that is important. To address this issue, a junior level interdisciplinary course has been created that explores a historical perspective of the development of technology and its impact on society in a global context. Within this framework lies the dilemma of how to make the subject interesting. Just offering lectures and discussion sessions does not do the subject justice. There had to be a better way to engage and capture the student's interest and curiosity. With this objective in mind, a project was initiated to accumulate or recreate technological artifacts from the past for the students to examine, touch, and even use. Then, in order to enhance the lectures, pictures, graphic images, and short videos were extensively used. Combining these techniques, the student's have become more engaged in the subject of technological literacy. The focus of this paper is to describe the methods undertaken to collect and recreate technologies from the past. The new artifacts were made using the tools and techniques from the past, just as engineers from generations ago did. Currently six collections representing a variety of technologies from different time periods exist and are used in the classroom. Future plans include adding more collections with additional artifacts obtained either through donation or recreation. The intention was to enhance and extend the student's understanding of past technological issues in order to better prepare them to solve the technological challenges they will encounter in the future.