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Editor's Note: Engineering, like medicine and science, is a notably
challenging and competitive discipline: lots of math, interesting
real-world problems, dauntingly complex textbooks, and a rigorously
demanding curriculum. That's the conventional wisdom, and for most
students, it's also the reality of their engineering programs. But Dr.
Richard R. Schultz, associate professor and chair of the University of
North Dakota Department of Electrical Engineering, says good engineering
education doesn't have to be all classroom, textbook grind.
 Schultz, who recently was awarded a three-year, $457,985 Defense EPSCoR
(Experimtental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant entitled
"Real-Time Super-Resolution Automatic Target Recognition of Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle-Based Reconnaissance and Surveillance Imagery," says
there's a place for tradition in the engineering curriculum-but
increasingly complex technologies also demand that students be
encouraged to learn engineering concepts in new ways.
In the following Q&A with Office of University Relations writer Juan
Miguel Pedraza, Schultz, who has served on UND's graduate faculty
committee and has been involved with the university's entrepreneurship
education efforts, briefly talks about an upcoming controls engineering
class that's set to break -- or at the very least update -- the
standard engineering teaching model for a course that is very math
intensive.
Q. What sets the engineering discipline apart from, say, history or
English?
A. We're typically pretty rigid in engineering when it comes to
lecturing and exams, and our classes are not generally
discussion-oriented.
Q. You and School of Engineering & Mines Dean John Watson, who wants to
see undergraduate engineering students do a lot more hands-on training
early in their education, are traveling a new path in engineering- maybe
not quite the way of history or English-but revolutionary as far as
engineering students go. What's this all about?
A. We need to help students learn more real-world problem-solving. We
can't do that with textbooks and lectures alone.
Q. So what is your recipe to address this challenge?
A. I'm teaching an advanced controls class this fall-(Electrical
Engineering) EE 505 Control Systems II-without a textbook. It'll be an
elective for seniors and graduate students who've already taken EE 405
Control Systems I, which is a requirement in UND's B.S. electrical
engineering curriculum. Incidentally, Control Systems I is taught in a
very conventional manner using lectures and exams, because it provides
the fundamental theory for more practical problem-solving related to
industrial controls and robotics.
(Editor's Note: In control systems courses, students learn about
electrical and/or electronic technology in a broad array of applications
such as automotive cruise control, airplane autopilot systems, barcode
readers, elevator controls, air conditioning and heating thermostats,
and robotics.)
Q. If you're not going to use a textbook, what are you planning to
do?
A. Students in this class will be prompted to Google the Net in search
of answers to questions and problems posed in class. There'll be lots
of discussion about key R&D papers that describe working control systems
designed and built by students at other universities, such as unmanned
ground vehicles and aerial robotic helicopters.
Q. What drove you to try this innovative, nontraditional approach in an
advanced engineering course?
A. I got inspired to do this partly after spending a week in June at
the Babson-Olin Symposium for Engineering Entrepreneurship Educators
with entrepreneurship guru Jeff Timmons of Babson College.
Timmons claims that within 10 years, virtually all knowledge will be on
the Web. Maybe we should just use that resource rather than fight it.
A key example of not-by-the-book instruction is the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge.
DARPA, the central research and development organization for the
Department of Defense (DoD), created the challenge in response to a
Congressional and DoD mandate to accelerate research and development in
autonomous ground vehicles that will help save American lives on the
battlefield. The Grand Challenge brings together academia, government,
and industry in the pursuit of solving one of the most daunting
technological challenges facing society today.
This project most certainly isn't just about classroom lecturing.
Q. What is the DARPA Grand Challenge?
A. This was a high-profile contest to design, build, and operate an
unmanned ground vehicle capable of autonomously navigating difficult
terrain that resulted in major advances in artificial intelligence.
DARPA put together a really tough course in the middle of the desert,
with the goal of having an autonomous vehicle finish it in a limited
amount of time.
The DARPA Grand Challenge really promoted hands-on learning in the
field, where teams of students took on the challenge and discovered that
testing under real environmental conditions really drove their sensor,
control, and software designs.
The Grand Challenge probably advanced the field of artificial
intelligence more in five years than federal funding has accomplished in
the previous 40.
Q. What's emerging here seems to be a "new way" of teaching
engineering that may provide, if not exactly an alternative, then at the
very least a strong supplement to traditional classroom teaching
methods. Is this correct?
A. Yes, from my experience, engineering students really seem to learn
best by doing, to see how to put resources together, to keep a team
going, to stay within budget, and still meet end-user requirements.
Students also feel gratified to learn that their profs don't have all
the answers, and that we learn just as much from them as they learn from
us, if we let them. |
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