Features editor
A fascinating conversation at the Global Grand Challenge Summit focused attention on how engineering is taught and why it needs to change — with input from an unexpected, but eloquent, source
It’s a big week for science and technology in London, with the Technology Strategy Board’s InnovateUK event; the Big Bang Fair; and the Global Grand Challenge Summit, which I attended yesterday. Organised by the Royal Academy of Engineering and its American and Chinese counterparts, the Summit provided a platform for technologists at the cutting edge of several new sectors, along with the people who’s task it is to make sure that engineers are working in the best possible way to meet the challenges of the coming decades.

The point at which all three events meet is in engineering education, which was discussed in a session at the Summit yesterday, with a surprise guest — the musician Will.i.am. Before anyone starts smirking, he was there in his role as a persuasive and eloquent advocate for science and technology education, especially in underprivileged urban areas — he funds a foundation devoted to this in the US. He doesn’t like the term STEM (‘Put A for Arts in it! STEAM! Or TEAMS; we can build TEAMS’o’STEAM!’) and is particularly keen on work which crosses traditional boundaries.
It might seem odd for a showbusiness figure more familiar to us from Saturday night television to be sharing a stage with luminaries such as JPL director Charles Elachi and Cambridge University head of engineering Dame Ann Dowling, but why not? As a musician and producer at the electronics and IT-heavy end of the spectrum, he’s actually as much of a hands-on technologist as anyone at the conference.
The main thrust of the education panel was a plea for engineering education to match more closely the experience of working engineers. This, said John Hennessy, president of Stanford University in California, not only makes more sense in that it will produce graduates who are used to the practices and techniques of working engineers, but it will also help to keep students interested and motivated throughout their courses. Currently, he added, the first thing they are faced with is an intimidating barrage of maths and theory which, although undoubtedly the building blocks of engineering practice, are hardly representative of what engineers do every day. ‘A lot of people come to college not really knowing what it is that engineers do, and we present them with that,’ he said. ‘It’s no wonder that people drop out. We need to attract the best and the brightest — and we need to keep them.’
Will.i.am provided a pithy analogy. ‘When you’re teaching kids to play football.. I mean soccer,’ he said, ‘you don’t sit them down and make them learn all the rules, draw them diagrams of passes and stuff, for a year, then run them out on the field, give them a ball and expect them to know what to do. You put them on the field at the start and let them play!’
The idea of getting students involved in projects and working in multidisciplinary teams was a popular one. ‘Everything we do is project-based. Life is project-based,’ said Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter among many other innovations. ‘The only thing that isn’t project-based is engineering school! And people say that it’s important to have sport in schools because it teaches teamwork. If teamwork is so important, why do they call it cheating when it happens in the classroom?’
Hennessy suggested focusing on the things which particularly inspire students and which will undoubtedly be needed in years to come. ‘We need to keep the idea of sustainability at the forefront of engineers’ minds,’ he said. ‘Getting them involved in sustainability projects will plant that seed.’ It will also be inspiring to students, showing them at an early stage that their work can really make a difference to the world.
The teaching of maths on engineering courses is a particularly contentious subjects. Traditionalists say that it’s the foundation on which all engineering is built and that all engineers must have a grasp of it. Modernisers, such as Prof Chris Wise, head of engineering design at UCL and founder of Expedition Engineering, the company behind the Olympic Velodrome, point out that most working engineers use computers to do maths and the hardcore theory isn’t necessary. ‘I’d much rather have one top mathematician on a project than six rubbish ones,’ he said. ‘And engineering courses tend to turn out rubbish mathematicians.’
For Wise, engineers are first and foremost designers and people who ask questions; the reductive process of solving the nuts and bolts of those solutions is best left to computers. For him, even the language of engineering can seem off-putting. ‘We talk about stress, strain, collapse and failure; we say we’re designing for collapse. Really?’ he said. ‘I want people to believe they’re creating something inspiring that will improve people’s lives, and those words don’t help.’
John Hennessy backed Wise up on the maths question, saying that it isn’t important for engineers to solve Maxwell’s equations, what they need to know is how to use Maxwell’s equations to design electronics. Even Will.i.am — by his own admission, no mathematician — agreed on this. ‘Math is the language of how the world works,’ he commented. ‘And when you combine math and art, you get music. We don’t even think of there being math there, but without it I couldn’t do what I do.’
The idea of changing the way engineering is taught to this degree is always going to be contentious. Maths is difficult and off-putting for many people (I’ll be honest here, it was one of the main reasons that I transferred off an engineering course in my undergraduate days) but it’s undoubtedly vital to engineering and it can’t possibly be taken out of engineering altogether, as even Chris Wise concedes.
Maybe the key is to change the way maths is taught, rather than removing it altogether — but the pedagogy of mathematics is even harder than the maths itself. If it helps keep the best and brightest people on the engineering courses when we need them, then it needs to be looked at. And the idea of making education echo more closely what students will encounter when they’re working makes even more sense; it’ll also help to keep them in the learning mindset, something that’s important to everyone. ‘I think we’d all agree that we didn’t learn the most important lessons in the lecture theatre or even the lab,’ said Hennessy. ‘We learned it when we were actually doing things.’
Engineers at the leading edge, need to have maths at some level, because of the Rumsfield Dilemma. There are some things that you know you know, and there are some things you don’t you know… and so on.
An engineer needs to know enough maths to know when he needs some real hard maths from a colleague. An engineer needs to know what maths is hard, and what isn’t. When I talk to people I don’t hold back on simple algebra. Try PV=nRT, the gas equation : it is a whole lot simpler in algebra than in words.
And you need to know something about calculus and stress how to use those computer programs which do the hard bits for you. When you have designed something new and you want to know whether making it a little bigger here, a little smaller there etc will make it better or worse, then you need some algebra.
Maths can actually add to your practical ‘feel’ for the behaviour of things in the real world – and it that practical feel for things which is at the heart of the best engineering.
Hear Hear! I absolutely agree with the idea of engineers getting involved with colleges/students.
Personally, I volunteer to help the UK training body OPITO every year with their ‘Energise Your Future’ events. During these events I talk with up to 600 teenagers about what an engineer actually does, what types of engineer there are, and how to become one. This might seem pretty basic stuff but many kids these don’t have any family role model in employment, let alone engineering.
Let us not forget that these students will ont day be paying for our state pensions!!
I completely agree that engineering education should teach students how to actually build things which means lots of projects. I’d go further to say that the high school students who enjoy building things are the ones who will make good engineers.
But I think many of the statements about maths in the article have more hyperbole in them than truth. The sports metaphors for engineering education are getting to be rather tired. The need to do rather than theorize applies to users of technology and not designers – truck drivers need to get on the field, while engineers need to know their physics and maths.
Engineers are not the same as mathematicians – we know this in so many ways. And yes, we need to teach maths for engineers well. When mathematicians teach maths it’s often too abstract for engineers. An example I use, is the way engineers think of the Laplace transform as a generalization of the Fourier, while mathematicians think of the Fourier transform as a special case of the Laplace.
Dean Kamen should know that Piaget made a similar observation about co-operation and cheating in a more serious way. Students can and should co-operate in learning, but if they lazily copy assignments to subvert the grading system, that’s neither co-operation nor learning; it’s simply cheating.
I watched the live stream of the panel discussion on iet.tv [It will be available for playback]. will.i.am made a number of good points about the teaching of maths and other STEM subjects from the perspective of someone who uses complex technology, but is not an engineer. I could never relate the maths I learned at school to anything in the real world and I do sometimes wonder how I became a professional engineer. However, it was dismaying to find, years later, that my son’s school maths was equally unrelated to anything real and now my daughter is going through the same process. I am a STEM Ambassador and go to schools to preach the word about engineering, but the students are not as challenging as the teachers, who very often have no idea what a professional engineer does, or what is needed to become one. When you add that many maths and science teachers, as is frequently reported, do not have degrees in what they teach, we have a real uphill struggle. As Steve D has already noted, these students will grow up to be the generation that pays our pensions, if they still exist! We owe it to ourselves, as well as our profession, to tell people what we do.
Derek Elder makes many good points, but I think he’s wrong about teachers not having a degree. It’s not a question of having a degree, it’s more about being able to communicate concepts. When you get above a certain level, maths is no longer intuative like it was with arithmatic. You need people who can help students take that leap into the unknown – calculus being an example. Part of the problem is that there are few ex-engineers in schools, so it’s no wonder that teachers don’t understand engineering. (Hence the old adage about ‘those who can do, and those who can’t teach).
Engineers design and build for success, where the measure of success is, among other aspects, the avoidance of failure, from inconsequential to catastrophically consequential, so let’s not edulcorate our technical vocabulary for the sake of attracting youngsters to the profession. Engineering is applied science and, while it includes tinkering and craftsmanship, it is superior to both. I do not see why something hard to understand without a lot of effort is, by default, considered, not fun, not attractive. Instead of eliminating Maxwell’s equations and all the mathematics from the foundation of the engineering education, we should make sure that all high-school graduates know about them, that Maxwell, Euler and all the rest are part of the general culture. I believe engineering math is difficult only for those who were deprived of a solid math curriculum in high-school.
Maybe if we do not constantly scare children with the idea that math is intimidating, they will understand how beautiful and useful it is, both for pure mental joy and for its many applications. And maybe if we teach them more about the great engineers and scientists through history, before their minds are filled with too much information about sportspeople and other entertainers, it would help ease any fear of serious stuff. For instance, we could teach them that Leonardo da Vinci is one the greatest engineers before the profession was defined. Of course, it is easier to talk a lot about one or two paintings, but I think it is more fascinating to know about his flying machines and all the other engineering work, for which we had to wait another 4-5 centuries to become common place. I dare say that painting was a hobby or a cover for his real passion, engineering.
I like Will.i.am, he does a lot of good work for STEM education. He recorded a song for NASA, which was beamed from the Mars Curiosity rover. I find that splendid. However, I would never worry that we lose the best and the brightest to football or to any professional sport for that matter ( I do not understand why there exist professional sports and why they deserve not only so much attention, but so much money, with no correlation to the value created. I do like football, but in its small place, in the great scheme of things). I believe the majority of us, young or old, prefer to challenge our minds and use to the maximum our unique capacity of abstract thought.
Not only I disagree with the idea of removing the theoretical foundation in engineering education, because it’s too hard and because some software can do it for us, but I think biology should be included in that foundation, besides, math, physics and chemistry, as engineers are expanding their work into sustainability, which requires a better emulation of the natural world.
Great article, Nathan. Thanks to all of you who mentor youngsters in engineering. For you and your mentees, here is a cool combination of music, fun and space technology:
http://spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=0
Having recently completed recruitment of a high-grade engineering team, our biggest problem has been to find engineers who can both design and analyse. With the vast majority of candidates the bias was clearly towards the design side and a near phobia of involved first-principles analysis was depressingly evident.
Contrast this with the view that engineering training is over-analytical and there is a clear disconnect somewhere.
I think that this is due to the aversion-therapy effect of overdoing the analytical side too early in development. A better approach is to introcuse analysis as a means to problem solving associated with a physical project, done this way there is a clear point to it and the need to grasp fundamentals can make the physical side of engineering more enjoyable. Particularly so when the analysis results in an enhanced physical outcome.
Good engineering comprises design and analysis supported by test. Analysis without test is fantasy, test without analysis is play. Both are vital to good design.
I also agree that arts and sciences/engineering should never have been separated. The French still refer to engineering as a “practical art” as did we until the early 20th century. Remember, complex ornamental (and mathematical) lathework and model engineering where originally regarded as hobbies for gentlemen.
Longer ago than I care to recall CP Snow (for whom I campaigned when he was appointed Rector at St Andrews) propounded the ‘two cultures’ philosophy that the Arts and Sciences within an educated person were so intimately linked that they should never be considered in isolation. How right he was.
I also subscribe fully to the comments about the necessity of a clear understanding of mathematical concepts: but that is not the same as their application: usually in scenarios where we have to ‘do for 10p what any fool could do for £1’ (N Shute, Engineer turned author)
Having studied purely technical topics from age 16 I did at age 46 start the OU Arts course. I likened it to going round a stately home, with which I was very familiar (science) finding a previously unseen door, opening it and finding a complete wing of the house, I did not even know existed (the Arts) I do believe my Engineering was better thereafter for that exposure to the ethereal, which I had always looked down upon, even mocked before.
Best to All Engineers and Arts folk! may they interlink!
Mike B
One does not need a degree in either Art or Engineering to appreciate that good design is always ‘elegant’ and thus, by default, artistic!