Learning engineering by practicing it

When we finished our final design project, it was already midnight. We stood up

to cheer our final victory and quickly slumped into our seats— everyone was so

exhausted. I remembered one of my groupmate hadn’t slept all day in order to calculate

the maximum efficiency of our design. When we finished our final report, he almost shut

his eyes. Yet, everyone was so excited. Looking at the final flow sheet of our micro gas

turbine that was nicely drawn, we had no regret of the many nights that we dedicated to

this project.

You probably wonder why we were so excited about this design project. And the

answer is Prof. Gordon, the designer of the project assignment. He is ultimately the

reason for our positive engineering experiences.

Prof. Gordon taught us second-year thermodynamics, a course known for

tedious engineering derivations. However, I wasn’t bored at all in this class because of

his invitationally inviting teaching. For the whole quarter, Prof. Gordon played a little

game with us: We pretended to be professional engineers employed by an engineering

consulting company called OneTenA Incorporation, and Prof. Gordon was to be our

“boss”. Everything happened in a professional setting. For example, Prof. Gordon would

address us as fellow engineers and would communicate with us using work memoirs. In

turn, we would submit our homework through emails adhering to the company’s

guidelines. Clearly, everyone was full of enthusiasm for being able to work as a

professional engineer. Looking back, He is the perfect example of an “Intentionally

inviting teacher”, which Smith, Fisher and Frey defined as “Consistently positive”,

“purposeful”, and “Sensitive to student needs and taking appropriate action”(23).

Because Prof. Gordon knew that many ChE students were unexcited about

thermodynamics, he came up with this role play to invite us to learn. Personally, I was

honored to be treated as a professional engineer. I consciously demanded myself to

meet that higher standard of engineers by treating every homework seriously. I don’t

know how many “professional emails” I wrote to him that quarter, but I was never bored

by thermodynamics. What’s more, I greatly improved my professional writing skills.

At the end of that quarter, Prof. Gordon gave us a challenging task: we

were asked to design and optimize a micro gas turbine. I remembered that I cheered for

a minute when professor Gordon announced this news. I have had several small design

projects in my previous ChE classes, such as in ChE5 and ChE10. All of those projects

resulted in fun learning experiences for me. But this one is different, it is by far the most

complex one. Smith, Fisher and Frey introduce the idea of “complex and meaningful

tasks” in their article “Relationship and Meaningful Instruction”, in which educators

discovered that a complex task not only captures students’ attention, it prompts them to

talk and seek collaboration with their peers in order to solve the challenge(37). Now I

can understand why the design project was so appealing to me. Because solving

challenging problems is inherently rewarding. And in order to solve these challenges, I

actively seek collaborations with my peers. I still remembered that when I was working

on this design project, me and my group members went through multiple webpages to

learn 3D graphing techniques in order to visualize our final calculation, which we were

never taught in class. Now, I am proud of this new skill whenever I want to make a

graph to explain my calculations.

 But what I loved about this design project was much more than being

challenging. By allowing us to learn through designing, Prof. Gordon released some of

his teaching responsibilities to his students, giving us real autonomy in the learning

process. Because now we are free to play with as many design variables we want to

play with; We are free to invest as much time as we please; We can make the design

extremely complex solely out of our love of the project. At the end of the day, our design

is like our child.

Being given so much freedom in the design project, we decided to make full use

of it. Thus, we endeavored to make our design as realistic as possible. And we even

added a lot of our own assumptions in the design specifications: We assumed a

constant heat capacity of the fuel. And we described the heat capacity of the inlet air as

a function of temperature. When we communicated our assumptions to Prof. Gordon,

he acknowledged our effort. He then encouraged us to put these assumptions through

careful calculations to test if they are reasonable. This is where professor Grodon

demonstrates his intentionally inviting teaching again: He encouraged us to go further in

our assumptions. Instead of deciding for us what assumptions are acceptable, he

wanted us to decide for ourselves based on our own calculations. For too long, we were

trapped in the mindset of solving problem sets- that all physical properties are clearly

defined and specified, and there is only one right answer. However, in real engineering,

we have to make bold assumptions about a lot of problems based on our own judgment.

In the end, we were so excited about this project that we were willing to write an

executive summary about our design and the analysis we made, convincing the

“management” of OneTenA Incorporation that our design is potentially profitable.

 In the article “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, Freire describes the “banking

concept of education”, in which students are simply asked to mechanically memorize

what the teacher says(72). When reflecting on my own educational experiences, I think

there is no place for the “banking concept of education” to survive in Prof. Gordon’s

engineering class, nor in any college education. Because the purpose of college

education is to explore the unknown world and expand human knowledge. This requires

everyone, professors and students, to be humble in front of nature. The truth is, in my

engineering classes, our professors often tell us that there is no good way to solve

many engineering problems yet. All we can do is guess. I believe in this sense, both

professors and students are ignorant in front of nature. We have to work together to

research the unknown world. Oftentimes, we are stuck by complicated questions in

engineering, and we go to Prof. Gordon’s office hours to see if we are working in the

right direction. But instead of having the answer, he would often admit that he hadn’t

worked out this problem too. He would then give us his own speculations and

encourage us to try out different approaches. In the end, we often find that we are

capable of answering our own doubts without getting a direct answer from the

professor. In Freire’s article, he wrote: “The teacher cannot think for her students, nor

can she impose thoughts on them”(77). Through the communications with Prof. Gordon,

We were encouraged to generate our authentic thinking. I think that’s the reason why

studying engineering was so fun to me.

 Work Cited

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Smith, Dominique, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey. “Relationships and

Meaningful Instruction: The Foundations of Restorative Practices.” Better than

Carrots or Sticks: Restorative Practices for Positive Classroom Management.

ASCD, 2015, pp. 21-51.