Teaching Engineering Technology To The Nintendo Generation

The statement has been made that “the students now entering Engineering Technology have spent the last 15 18 years with interactive video, educational rock, and VCRs.” Anecdotal experience indicates that they have spent considerably less time with erector sets, with lawn mower engines, with the use of tools, and the exploration of the fundamentals of mechanical and electrical structures. This statement would suggest that we, as evaluators and educators, would need to change our approach to teaching Engineering Technology in order to gear our programs to that of our customer’s experiences and expectations. But do we need to do this? Although the buzzwords today are on computer simulations, virtual reality, etc., I do not feel that the needs of the “real world” have changed. There is still a need to be able to have that “hands-on” experience that only an Engineering Technologist has and can bring to the work force. To this end, laboratory experiments should be laid out in such a manner as to duplicate a “real world” situation. These experiments should be designed so as to build on the previous experiment, just as classroom lectures build on one another, and arrive at a “real world” application. This way, students will gain experience in seeing how a complicated design is built up of many simple circuits. A set of laboratory courses, which are presently used in the Electrical Engineering Technology program at the Purdue University School of Technology site at Columbus, will be presented to show how this has been achieved.