Lorne Davis Texas Lutheran University Physics Department March 4, 2011

1. Re-Engineering Pre-Engineering Education in a Liberal Arts Environment for the 21st Century Lorne Davis Texas Lutheran University Physics Department March 4, 2011

2. Why Blend Pre-Engineering with Physics? • For our students, the needs exist. • In small schools, small physics departments struggle to exist. • To reach departmental critical mass, draw the circle bigger; the student ratio in physics : applied sciences : engineering is 1: 1: 6.

3. Starting Pre-Engineering: Six Knows Make a YES! Know your present state. Know what would be better. Know your resources (people, sota, $, …). Know your customer. Know your mission. Know your goal.

4. Execute the Biological Imperative* Decide Do Sense * Corollary: You seldom get it right the first time … or for very long.

5. Our Program History vs.Our Benchmark Department

6. Resources: the State of the Art + the ASEE Prism periodical

7. Our Resources: Environment We live in the population center of TX. TX students are provincial. TX students are brand conscious. Not all potentially successful engineering students are ‘drafted’ into the state engineering schools. Not all talented new students have already chosen or prepared for their vocation.

8. Our Most Important Resource Attitude

9. What is the external environment in engineering education? • The U.S.A. is steadily heading toward requiring a graduate degree to obtain professional engineering licensing. (ABET) • Simultaneously, the first engineering degree has become more generic, more abstracted, with less “trade-school” orientation. That is, the STYLE of engineering education is becoming more like physics BUT WITH A DIFFERENT CONTENT AND A DIFFERENT FOCUS.

10. Your Customer, Your Problem Typically the engineering customer does not understand what is possible, what is better, and what is needed. However, they do want to tell you how to do it. (Do you see this in teaching today?)

11. Who Benefits Most From a 3/2 Pre-Engineering Program? Students seeking involvement (music, sports, mixed degrees) Students seeking a personalized experience Students developing toward continuing self-education Students still seeking a vocational identity

12. The Mission, if you choose to accept it… You are no longer a physics professor with a mission to clone yourself. Your mission is to be a guide & mentor for the life’s vocation of another. Beware of “profession prejudice” ! It poisons your local culture.

13. Our Goals Are Our Products • The B.A. physicist-technician • The 3/2 pre-engineering transfer student • The graduate student in traditional physics in applied hyphenated-physics in M. S. engineering programs

14. Pre-Engineering:Our Product Is Our Goal Our goal is not to produce good engineers. Our goal is to produce good engineering students.

15. As a department, what curriculum will allow us to adapt and prosper? • Blend physics, applied physics, modern computation and fundamental engineering concepts into a hands-on multi-professional curriculum. • This must include summer practice in research & design.

16. Formulating Pre-Engineering Traditional 3/2 pre-engineering is like a box of chocolates.* Academic disciplines exist as separately prepared components. At best, the formulation is a marble-cake stirring. There are no significant new interactions, no synergies of ingredients. * Forrest Gump

17. How do we finely blend the disciplines? • “Shaken, not stirred.” • We have been trying to increase the surface area for the interaction between disciplines in an attempt to create the kind of multi-disciplinary generalist that, for me, took decades to mold.

18. Our Action-List for Blending • Teach fundamentals of problem solving • Coach teamwork • Mentor engineering design • Mold quantitative critical thinking • Introduce inverse problems • Inject key engineering intellectual concepts • Provide problem-based learning through student research projects

19. The Pre-Engineering Curriculum Introduction to Engineering Introduction to C Physics I Yr 1 Physics II Chemistry I Engineering Physics with lab Yr 2 (Intermediate Mechanics) Computational Applied Science I Adv. Phys Lab I Computational Applied Science II Yr 3

20. Teach Engineering Design Using Familiar Materials, LEGOSTM! We execute the philosophy of engineering,heuristics, through the sociology of engineering, teamwork, as we do team design of autonomous robots. ENGR 132: Intro to Engr Now linked with CSCI 136, Intro to C

21. We started withthe 8-bitmicroprocessorLEGOTMMindStormsandhave now moved to the LEGOMindStorms NXT

22. We started with LabViewTMRoboLabbut have switched to RobotCTM.

23. Computational Applied Science I

24. MATLABTM is a programming environment for our Computational Applied Science courses. It is also the modern version of the engineer’s slide rule.

25. Applied Sci. Learning Objectives Apply continuous math concepts to enormous, discrete, sampled datasets Develop critical judgment skills for using canned numerical processing packages Handle drop-outs & noise in datasets too massive for humans to interrogate

26. Computational Applied Science II Started with Harvey Mudd College inspires us for this.

27. Applied Physics: Transport Phenomena Started with

28. Applied Physics Lab elementary PASCOTM equipment + 2 open-ended experiments

29. A Major Obstacle in Modern Pre-Engineering Education “I want absolute guarantees of my success and total transfer of all course credit with minimum expended effort, time, and money.”

30. My “High Impact Practice”Blend of Student Research in Physics, Engineering, Computation, & Geology

31. High Tech NMR Engineering: • 80% of today’s important problems are • INVERSEproblems (e.g. CT, MRI) • given the result, find the cause, and usually involve intensive modeling & computation.

32. Creating a Blended Curriculum “ The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” --- William Gibson As mentors, our job is to shake it up. funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation

33. Learning Computational Critical Thinking • Student: Why are digital techniques important? • Prof: Because you can easily do all this. • Student: But is it real?

34. Digital Processing Changes the World: What We Can Do and How It’s Done One Page Of Code Can Turn Dylan Into Elvis!

35. Digital Audio ‘Morphing’

36. 3/2 Pre-Engineering Typical Courses • MATH 231 Calculus I (3:3:0) • MATH 232 Calculus II (3:3:0) • MATH 333 Calculus III (3:3:0) • MATH 334 Differential Equations (3:3:0) • STAT 374 Statistics (3:3:0) • PHYS 240 Principles of Physics I (4:3:3) • PHYS 241 Principles of Physics II (4:3:3) • PHYS 312 Advanced Physics Lab I (1:0:3) • CHEM 143 General Chemistry I (4:3:3) • ENGR 132 Introduction to Engineering (3:2:3) • ENGR/PHYS 390 Computational Applied Science I (3:3:0) • ENGR/PHYS 391 Computational Applied Science II (3:3:0) • PHYS 331 Intermediate Mechanics (3:3:0) • PHYS 392 Engineering Physics w lab (3:2:3) • PHYS 383 Electronics (3:2:3)