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Jeffrey S. Russell: Inspiring engineers to think differently
Engineering Beyond
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Putting this together in a four-year undergraduate experience is a formidable challenge for engineering programs, which also face higher required levels of rigor in math, chemistry, physics and biology.
To help, Russell and colleagues created “Integrated Studies in Science, Engineering and Society” (ISSuES). The certificate program provides a structure for students to maximize the impact of their outside-of-engineering coursework and glean more meaningful engagement in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Launched in fall 2009, the certificate received lead support from Engineering Beyond Boundaries and expects to enroll 25 students each year over the first four years.
Russell teamed on the project with Sarah Pfatteicher, assistant dean in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, and Daniel Kleinmann, director of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and chair of community and environmental sociology.
The Holtz Center provides the perfect academic partner for the certificate. Robert Holtz, a Wisconsin native and successful engineer, and his wife Jean formed the center in 2001 to help people better address the social and cultural ramifications of technological change. Students in the certificate will take one required course, Where Science Meets Society, from the Holtz Center, and have academic advisors from Holtz and engineering. The certificate is built around four academic tracks — ethics, leadership, design and general — on which students will build their own 16-credit program. “We want the students to own the education,” Russell says. “There are guidelines and suggestions, but what ultimately comes out of this is a theme developed by the student, with the help of faculty, to fit a vision.”
Elise Larson, a Biomedical Engineering undergraduate and certificate student, created a vision to understand the junction of engineering and art and to use trends in both fields to reflect the human factor in engineering design. Larson fashioned a group of courses in art history, studio drawing and material culture that will make her more aware of how her work as an engineer is used, internalized and interpreted by society.
Larson’s example demonstrates what Russell hopes to see from the certificate — students combining courses that give added definition and relevance to their professional goals. “We underachieve in the humanities and social sciences in the sense that many students look at them as requirements that must be satisfied — as we say, ‘check off the box’ — as opposed to thinking about them in an intentional, integrated development perspective,” he says.
So far, students have entered the program with diverse interests, including ethical questions involving health and medicine, leadership skills and what it means to be an effective leader, and policy issues.
Russell notes that the intersection of engineering and art has long been recognized and says humanities disciplines challenge engineers with a different way of thinking.
“Think about the incredible amount of preparation, organization, creativity, movement, thought and execution that goes into a dance recital,” he says. “There are lots of similarities to engineering, but in a completely different context.”
Student news - UW-Madison chapter of Engineers Without Borders wins United Nations award
Student Kyle Ankenbauer (left) with Haitian Ambassador to Europe Jean-Robert Saget and Haitian engineer Kenold Decimus at the United Nations Mondialogo Award ceremony in Germany. (large image) |
Two students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison chapter of Engineers Without Borders have returned from Stuttgart, Germany, after accepting a prestigious engineering award from the United Nations for the chapter’s work in rural Haiti.
EWB-UW Haiti co-project manager Kyle Ankenbauer, a civil engineering student, and UW-Madison chapter president Eyleen Chou, a mechanical engineering student, made the trip to accept $22,400 and a gold medal Mondialogo Engineering Award, a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and Daimler initiative to recognize engineering achievements aimed at meeting United Nations millennium development goals and fostering intercultural dialogue. The award was presented at the Mondialogo Symposium, held Nov. 6-9.
This is the second time the EWB-UW group has won a Mondialogo award; in 2005, the Rwanda project won a bronze award and about $7,000.
“This is a huge honor, and it feels really good to have the project recognized at such a high level,” says Ankenbauer. “The award will help generate a lot of momentum behind this project since it’s been recognized by the UN.”
Engineers Without Borders is a nonprofit organization dedicated to serving underdeveloped countries and communities around the world. In addition to Haiti, the active UW-Madison chapter, which is advised by Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Giri Venkataramanan and Civil and Environmental Engineering Adjunct Professor Norman Doll, has projects in Rwanda, Kenya, El Salvador and Red Cliff, Wisconsin. The Haiti project is unique because the UW-Madison chapter is collaborating extensively with other EWB chapters and NGOs. They share the Mondialogo award with Quisqueya University in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Bayonnais native and engineer Kenold Decimus joined Ankenbauer and Chou in Germany.
For much of the year, the Saint-Cyr River in northern Haiti is a docile trickle 1 foot deep. However, when the late spring rains bear down on the Saint-Cyr, the river swells in some points to be more than 30 feet across and 10 feet deep. This volatility left a sinking feeling in the student members of the UW-Madison chapter of Engineers Without Borders when they realized the extent of the flooding during their trip to Haiti in June 2009 to begin building a hydroelectric power generator: The site for the generator was in one of the areas most affected by flooding.
The students rallied to find a safer site, and they are currently working to construct a mini-hydroelectric power generator at the new site, which will provide 3 to 5 kilowatt hours of electricity to a school, library and church in Bayonnais, Haiti. The generator will also serve as a pilot project for a larger, 15 to 25 kilowatt generator the group may build for a community clinic currently in design.
The University of Colorado-Boulder launched the first chapter of EWB in 2000 and a bridge project in Haiti was one of its earliest initiatives. Graduate student Scott Hamel was with the project from the beginning in 2002, and when he came to UW-Madison to pursue a PhD in civil and environmental engineering, he encouraged the EWB-UW group to get involved.
The UW-Madison group did in 2006 and continued work on the bridge project in collaboration with the EWB San Francisco professional chapter (which currently is designing the clinic), a non-governmental organization in Haiti, and a church in North Carolina that now will support a salary for a local community member trained to maintain the hydroelectric generator. In addition to finishing and repairing the bridge after Hurricane Hannah, the EWB-UW group is currently repairing a 10-mile pipe that carries fresh water through Bayonnais and was recently damaged in a hurricane.
For Hamel, the connections he made with local people are why he continued to stay involved with the Haiti project. “It’s the poorest country in the western hemisphere,” he says. “I feel a sense of responsibility toward people who haven’t had the same opportunities I’ve had, and the people I’ve met in Haiti are my friends now.”
Ankenbauer says the people of Bayonnais want to help improve their community. “We’re simply bringing technology to people who are capable of supporting it and using it to better their community,” he says.
Wendy Crone: Taking design courses into the YouTube era
Engineering Beyond
Boundaries Initiative
The College of Engineering 2010 initiative, now known as Engineering Beyond Boundaries, or EB2, began in 2005. This long-term effort aims to transform undergraduate education to better prepare our graduates to work in culturally diverse, cross-disciplinary teams to address global grand challenges.
Engineers will play a role in solving every major challenge facing society. Yet there is no single complex problem that will be solved exclusively by engineers. To make a difference, engineers will need to contribute to teams that are culturally and intellectually diverse. Through EB2, we hope to make that diversity come to life for our students.
Engineering design students affectionately call it “team time,” the part of class when they brainstorm topics, discuss applications, organize a game plan and generally take a design idea through its necessary paces.
The one cardinal rule of “team time,” says Engineering Physics Professor Wendy Crone, is that there never seems to be enough of it.
Crone and Biomedical Engineering Associate Professor Naomi Chesler decided to tackle this time management challenge by turning to the burgeoning field of online video. Using some of the top experts from both on and off the UW-Madison campus, the team created a library of two dozen lectures that cover the core principles of design, including communication, design considerations, the design process and patents and literature.
Before each topic is covered in class, students view the corresponding video, slides and resource links. Topics include human factors and ergonomics, codes and standards, oral and poster presentations, achieving FDA approval, working in teams and conflict resolution. They come to class ready to discuss the principles, rather than hear them for the first time.
The 100-plus biomedical engineering students involved in the 2009 pilot project responded positively to the video enhancements — in fact, a post-class survey found that 61 percent of students preferred the video lectures, compared to only 15 percent favoring in-class lectures.
There’s a strong reason for that preference, Crone says. “This video option enables students to gain more flexibility in the classroom through more independent work outside of class. They can now use that valuable class time to its best advantage.”
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The flexibility of online delivery is another plus, Crone says. Students not only access the material when and where it’s convenient, they revisit and review the areas where they need more help, and skip concepts they have already mastered. And, as someone who occasionally gets accused of talking too fast in her lectures, Crone says some students like the option of putting their instructor on pause.
“We also hoped the project would build community among students,” she says. “It has done a fantastic job with that because they interact heavily with each other every week. There is less sitting and listening taking place.”
Crone came to the design project with good experience, having developed a series of online guest lectures introducing engineering students to research methodology. That program succeeded not only in her course, but the materials have been adopted by dozens of other instructors across the nation and world.
The video website has received nearly 3,500 unique visitors since fall 2008, nearly half from outside of Wisconsin. (View the site at: mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/research/.) A University of Connecticut chemistry professor called the video on applying for undergraduate research opportunities “essential viewing” for his students.
With that success in hand, Crone applied for and received an Engineering Beyond Boundaries grant in 2007 to expand into engineering design courses. Her project team includes Chesler; Katie Cadwell, postdoctoral research associate in the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC); and Greta Zenner, director of education at MRSEC.
Through both projects, the MRSEC website features a combined 52 online videos covering research, design and professional opportunities topics — areas that are at the core of the engineering undergraduate experience. Crone is excited about the possibilities of this online library being applied across the spectrum of design and research courses in eight college departments.
Crone notes that as an engineering physics professor, she does not teach design. But that’s part of the beauty of Engineering Beyond Boundaries — giving faculty the incentive to experiment outside of their comfort zone.
“For me, it has been a permission slip to do the next cool thing,” she says.
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