Conference Session

Engineering Literacy: Champions of Engineering in General Education

Collection

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Daniel Flath, Macalester College; Diane P Michelfelder, Macalester College

Tagged Topics

Diversity

Tagged Divisions

Technological and Engineering Literacy/Philosophy of Engineering

. Since there are fourteen Grand Challenges and just about that many weeks in asemester, in principle this could have worked well. But even though the Grand Challenges arevivid illustrations of how engineering problems and their solutions have social-political-ethicaldimensions, we concluded that it would be a better idea, in terms of discussing engineeredproducts, to start from the ordinary and the mundane, and expand from there. It is here howHenry Petroski’s reflections on the paper clip in Invention by Design and Mark Miodownick’schapter on plastic from Stuff Matters entered the course syllabus. The order of design projectsworked the same centrifugal way, as we started with a “solar hack” project on which studentsworked individually, and