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TEDx Talks
Published: 2011-03-24
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp9PfqUQ8a4
I am Dave Goldberg and fifty one days ago I resigned my tenure at the university of Illinois to start a consultancy and an executive coaching firm to help transform engineering education in this country and around the world in the next six minutes I want to tell you why tell a little story about why that's so important to me and why this is important do you the
story begins at the end of World War two beginning of what became the Cold War engineering education and engineering practice realignment self with the perception that physics won the war and as a result design and practical subjects were removed from engineering training and apart from engineering practice fast forward to our times now in the twenty first century and we live in a world that some have
said we live in a world that is flat Richard Florida says that we live in a world with a rising creative class and Dan pink says that we live in a world that requires a whole new creative mind so that gap between the Cold War engineer post war and the engineer for the twenty first century could be a big one and so how can we go
about exploring that and what I'd like to do is follow Steven Covey's advice and begin with the end in mind and how might we do that so let's get together with a team of three students at the university of Illinois and going to solve a real world problem as part of an industrially sponsored senior design course in fact let's go up to Chicago to Azteca foods
and try to reduce the amount of dusting flower use doesn't sound like a big problem but it's a problem because fat company millions of dollars and and causes them to be %HESITATION unprofitable so we send the kids off into the field to go talk to the client and what's the first thing we noticed that they don't know how to do we notice that they don't know
how to ask a good question that's a little surprising because Socrates taught the western world ask good questions in the fifth century BC in Athens and that's part of our great western tradition so how is it that we created engineers but don't know how to ask so you coach on any given to ask those questions and they collect a lot of data then why don't they
know how to do well then they don't know how to label the patterns in the data that will help them solve the problem of course that's a little puzzling because Aristotle taught the western world how to do that in about the fourth century BC so again where we've lost some of the the greatness of the western tradition in how we teach our engineers how to conduct
themselves well again your coachman you get on to solve work on the problem solve the problem began to label some patterns and then and then they have to figure out what the problem really is and that requires them to model conceptually either as a categorical lest or perhaps as a causal chain but directly nation this to plug into equations because after all that's what we taught
him how to do we taught him to plug into Newton's laws in Maxwell's equations to beat the band but when actually have to think logically from step to step four fifty compositionally on they don't know how to do it then they actually have a problem to solve they've kind of model it and now they have to bust that little epic problem up into a box a
little problems in order to make some progress in the course of the semester and here the failure is a failure that a car warned us about in his discourse on method to decompose problems is the beginning of solving them and our students have trouble doing that because they're still looking for that set of equations to plug into and get the magic answer so you coach Amman
that now they've got a little problem Sasol and some of those little problems are problems where the quickest way into a solution the royal road to a solution as a little experiment out in the world aquaria problem a query to query nature and find out what the answer might be rather than to do some theory so we we coach we we pride we get them to
model up what we get them to experiment %HESITATION and the end they they succeed but their inclination wasn't with them and so we might call that a failure of your favorite empiricist here I've chosen John Locke as as as my poster child alright so now they've got so they've really got things going in now they really have to come up with a creative solution to the
problem and of course at the at the Cold War we removed a lot of engineering graphics and ideation and creativity from the curriculum and so they're at a loss as to how to do those things and so here we might say this is a failure of divinity one no wonder most one on one I depending on on which which great person you one of the Pentagon
so again you coach them and get them to sketch you get them to visualize %HESITATION and finally they solve the problem and they have to present the results to their client they have to present a report they have to approve make a presentation and what don't they know how to do well this is really akin to that warden in cool hand Luke saying what we have
here is a failure to keep to communicate so we'll tag the Great Western sage Paul Newman with S. failure well the seven things in the I. foundry initiative at the university of Illinois we call the missing basics of engineering the ability to question the ability to label the ability to model ability to decompose the ability to experiment the ability to visualize it visualize an idea and
the ability to communicate our skills that are absolutely essential to be a great engineer there are also things that are really important if the engineers of our century are going to connect to human problems and can act with humanists social scientists artists and the rest of the camp the intellectual and and practical community to help solve these tough problems and if we do those things will
