The departments of physics and mathematics collaborated with the engineering school to create an innovative series of courses that integrate all their subjects into a multidisciplinary curriculum for freshman engineers. The courses are an initiative of Princeton’s newly created Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. ABOVE: Freshman Nicole Clarke works on an electronic device that will measure the acceleration of a water-propelled rocket. BELOW: Physics graduate student Vassilios Papathanakos (left) helps freshman Liz Brennan with the device. The students expect to build and launch the rocket by the end of November.
Below left: H. Vincent Poor will serve as the center’s first director.
Photos: Denise Applewhite
Responding to a national need to rethink the teaching of
engineering, Princeton University has created the Center for Innovation
in Engineering Education(Link is external), an initiative to better prepare all students
-- both engineers and non-engineers -- to be leaders in an increasingly
complex, technology-driven society.
The center is creating new courses and strengthening existing ones that
go beyond purely technical subjects to provide students a broader
understanding of the global economic, environmental and cultural forces
that shape and are shaped by technology. At the same time, the center
is improving students’ technical education by exposing them to real
engineering projects throughout their four years, through internships,
entrepreneurial opportunities and multidisciplinary courses.
“Our plan is to set a new standard for engineering education,” said H.
Vincent Poor, the director of the center and Princeton’s George Van
Ness Lothrop Professor in Engineering. “We want to inject more
engineering into the liberal arts and inject more of the liberal arts
into engineering.”
“Engineering and applied science are going to play a key role in
determining what happens to the world during the next 25 years,” said
Maria Klawe, dean of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science(Link is external). “The difference between technology that makes the world a
better place and technology that creates additional problems will
depend on our ability as a society to educate leaders who are well
versed in both technical and nontechnical fields.”
The creation of the center is one of the key initiatives to emerge from
the engineering school’s strategic plan, “Engineering for a Better
World: The Princeton Vision,” which it adopted in May 2004. Poor was
appointed director of the center in February 2005, and its first
curriculum innovations are starting this fall.
The center’s initial projects are to:
• introduce, starting this fall, a freshman curriculum that combines
math, physics and hands-on engineering into an integrated series of
courses;
• expand the engineering school’s already strong offering of
interdisciplinary courses that attract humanities majors and other
non-engineers; the goal is for more than 90 percent of all Princeton
students to take at least one engineering course during their four
years;
• build more exposure to engineering practice into the undergraduate
experience by fostering internships and creating more classes that
promote leadership, teamwork, product design and communications;
• emphasize invention and entrepreneurship by challenging students to
address specific societal needs and pursue commercial opportunities.
In all these efforts, the center will seek to attract students from a
wide variety of backgrounds and bring an international and
interdisciplinary perspective to their education.
William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, said
the center’s agenda addresses important issues confronting the U.S.
engineering profession, including the need to expose students to real
engineering problems in all four years. “If there were one thing I
would change in all engineering curricula, it would be exactly that --
giving students more experience with the practice of engineering,” Wulf
said.
The center’s plan to foster connections between engineers and
non-engineers also is crucial, Wulf said. “As engineers, we create
solutions to human problems. We do it within a set of constraints that
are not just issues of size, weight and power consumption. If you
ignore the human dimension, you are not going to get as good a
solution.”
New curriculum choices
The center’s efforts began this fall with the introduction of a course
called EMP, which combines engineering, math and physics. In
conventional engineering programs, students spend their first year
taking required foundational courses that provide little exposure to
real engineering problems. The new Princeton course, which involves 10
faculty members from seven departments, addresses the fundamentals in
tandem with hands-on projects that show students where their
preparations are leading. Labs, for example, deal with problems of
energy consumption, robotic sensing and digital image transmission.
“The idea here is to integrate the subjects so students see the
connections,” said Poor. “They can transfer something they learned in
math to physics, and back and forth. Those ideas will then improve
their engineering work, which, coming full circle, will motivate and
deepen their understanding of math and physics.”
The center is starting from a solid base in its effort to reach beyond
students majoring in engineering. With nearly two-thirds of all
Princeton students already taking at least one engineering class, a
goal of 90 percent is ambitious but attainable once the school introduces more interdisciplinary courses, according to Poor.
“Everyone receiving a first-rate education -- everyone who wants to
make a positive difference -- has to understand the technologies that
are going to affect the future of the world, as well as the public
policy and other societal choices that are to be made in concert with
technological developments,” he said.
The center also will broaden the education of engineering students by
working with businesses to create summer internships, which will expose
students to the real applications of their learning and allow them to
bring new perspectives back to the classroom.
At the same time, some Princeton engineering classes will adopt more
elements of the business world, with a particular focus on invention
and entrepreneurship. The center will build on the success of courses
such as “High-Tech Entrepreneurship” led by longtime entrepreneur and
former Harvard Business School professor Ed Zschau. For example, Daniel
Nosenchuck, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has
created a course in which teams of engineering majors and humanities
majors will work together to analyze markets and design products, which
will be judged and possibly adopted by executives from major consumer
products companies.
Taken together, the center’s initiatives are intended to advance
another major goal: increasing the diversity of engineering students.
Among the many cultural barriers and stereotypes that have limited the
diversity of the pool of people who chose careers in engineering, a
persistent problem has simply been the way engineering is taught, said
Klawe. “We lose students who have outstanding technical skills but are
not willing to devote their entire educations to the study of
technology for its own sake,” she said. “These students want to use
their skills to make a difference in the world. The Center for
Innovation in Engineering Education will help them do that.”
