By Rachel Davis, Staff Writer

If you ask senior engineering students Laura Buller and Lee McColgan about the quality and interest level of their engineering education, they give enthusiastic reviews, citing the hands-on projects, creative stimulation, and talented faculty they have encountered during their last two years of study.

McColgan will tell you about his favorite course, taken in his junior year—the University of Virginia's CS 340, "Advanced Software Development"—during which students worked like a real industrial team on the development of a software system for the remote control of a robot, in a task he says was very similar to the Mars lander scenario. And Buller says her junior and senior design classes, taken on top of a solid core curriculum, have enhanced a "great" educational experience at Kansas State University.

But if you ask about the first two years of their university education, aside from recognizing that those early courses were essential as a learning foundation, it's almost as if they would have preferred to skip it and just get to the "good stuff." They remember many of their classmates becoming disenchanted, overwhelmed, or lost in the shuffle during those first years, without ever achieving a real understanding of what engineering is all about.

Buller remembers being discouraged by the initial course load, and McColgan says that although he understood that his first-year core courses were necessary, "I found myself indifferent to them. I had no drive to apply myself in these courses, since I would just as soon forget the material once I was done with it."

They also acknowledge, however, that the freshmen and sophomores who followed them were beginning to experience more teamwork, hands-on activities, and computer-based learning in the curricula than the seniors had received in their own first years. This reflects a trend in engineering education across the country, as many engineering educators search—and sometimes struggle—for ways to spark creativity in their students and incorporate more hands-on design work, use of computer technology, multidisciplinary teaming, and diversity into all four years of engineering training.

Although the number of colleges and universities making such changes is increasing, many educators agree that innovative programs for first-year students are still the exception, rather than the rule. Considering that the number of U.S. undergraduates receiving engineering degrees has sunk 15% over the last decade, according to the Engineering Workforce Commission, many educators feel the need for further efforts to "re-engineer" core curricula.

Many schools are trying out design courses that give freshmen and sophomores a realistic look at what it's like to be an engineer, to make their core course work seem more meaningful, according to a paper by educators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the Journal of Engineering Education, on the pilot semester of a freshman engineering design course. Part of the reason for the efforts is the high attrition rate of students who enter college as engineering majors. Many reports point out that "less than half of these students persist in their engineering curriculum until graduation," the paper says.

To offer freshmen the chance to start their aerospace engineering education in their first year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers "Introduction to Aerospace and Design," a freshman elective course that culminates in a Lighter-Than-Air (LTA) vehicle design competition, which gives students a chance to experience the excitement of design that is typically offered only to juniors and seniors. Kate Mink of the civil and environmental engineering department at Cornell University says that design and hands-on learning are emphasized in all four years at Cornell. One popular course, Civil Engineering 116-"Modern Structures," gives students the chance to use computer-graphics programs to design and predict the strength of a complete balsa-wood bridge. Then, the students build their bridges by hand and test them to destruction, Mink explains.

Other colleges and universities that participate in the National Science Foundation's Engineering Education Coalitions program are also attempting to incorporate more design and teamwork elements into first-year curricula. A four-year-old Foundation Coalition program at Arizona State University (ASU), called the Freshman Integrated Program in Engineering (FIPE), emphasizes interpersonal skills, multidisciplinary teaming, use of the latest computer software, and project-based learning.

Don Evans, Participating Institutional Coordinator for the Foundation Coalition at ASU, says the FIPE program fuses learning of core courses with activities such as mapping the performance of a squash ball launcher for use in hitting a target and an exercise in physics and calculus that instructors call the "bungee omelette." In this project, 80 first-semester freshmen do design work to determine how close they can get a raw egg attached to a bungee cord to the ground without breaking it, when they drop it from the top of the ASU track stadium.

The high emphasis on teaming and interpersonal skills, says Evans, will go along with ABET criteria for accreditation in 2001, which will require that students graduating from an accredited program can work in interdisciplinary teams. In addition, Evans says, industry has been complaining to schools for the last five years that engineering graduates are entering the workforce without knowing how to relate to team members.

Innovative programs of this type are not without their critics, however. Protests can be based on anything from freshmen not being "ready"; to lack of time, energy, and money; to claims that freshmen shouldn't be jumping ahead to "thinking with computers" at a time when American students fall short globally in mathematics.

However, instead of raising criticism, says Jeffrey Froyd, an engineering professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a member school of the Foundation Coalition, it's important to concentrate on the processes that help accelerate change, providing opportunities for faculty to become aware of proposed changes and discuss these issues openly.

Although engineering education will continue to change, "engineering and science faculty are people, and people don't readily embrace change," Froyd says. "Therefore, when new approaches to engineering education are presented that require faculty to change, the reception is not likely to be warm." But it should not be construed as an "Us" vs. "Them" scenario, he emphasizes.

One concern continues to be heard: Will students learn enough of the core math, science, and engineering in these innovative classes? Many educators say yes, and more. In addition, the Foundation Coalition has recently released data on the program's "success stories" that show about a 15% greater retention rate for students in the FC program than for those outside the program at Arizona State, which recently saw its first FC graduates in 1998. Citing data from 1994-95, FC also claims that standardized test results for Texas A&M students within the program were better than for those engineering students in the traditional program.

Senior engineering student Laura Buller, for one, won't argue with those findings. "It's a no-brainer" that including design work and encouraging creativity in first-year curricula will keep the students working toward a degree in engineering, she says. "I guarantee you I would have liked to have done hands-on engineering my freshman year. I probably would have learned a lot more about my major if I had."

Copyright ©1998 National Society of Professional Engineers