The Learning Seesaw

Engineering students must balance thinking for themselves and studying the work of experts. Tools and technologies can help.

By Chris Rogers

In engineering programs, students must learn to consider ideas in a certain way (e.g., think like a scientist) and study the work of those who have come before them (e.g., understand Newton’s laws). Some courses are more open-ended, focused on thinking skills; others are more lecture-style with an emphasis on explaining. Both are necessary. Without grasping what scientists and engineers have discovered in the last few centuries, it would be hard to develop complex ideas. At the same time, students who have only been taught what others have done are at a disadvantage when they have to create on their own.

Kindergarten starts children off with a good mix of supporting their thinking and teaching them the thinking of others. But as students age, many schools tend to emphasize the latter, partially as a result of standardized tests, which primarily test replication abilities. In college, historically, faculty felt that learners could not be truly creative until they had the “fundamentals” under their belts—physics, calculus, etc. In the last few decades, we have seen this premise challenged again and again. Research shows that giving students a problem to solve that requires Newton’s laws, for example, can help motivate learning to understand them.

To measure the extent of the two methods in a classroom, I use solution diversity. If all students return the same answer to an assignment, then most likely I have tested their ability to understand my knowledge. If there is a large range of answers, then that is usually a sign that they had to think for themselves (or I totally failed in the class). The second case values student opinion, whereas the first values the opinion of past experts.

Educational technology can help or hinder the independent thinking. Flash cards, worksheets, and problems in the back of the book (physical or digital) can assist one to get “the right answer,” but rarely support more open-ended problems. To develop their own ideas, students will turn to online references, such as Stack Overflow, W3Schools, Google searches, Instructables, and Miro boards. Jupyter Notebooks or Google Colab allow the instructor to create a scaffold and embed hints and links; each student can fill in different code that is easily tested.

Often tools can be used for both: a lecturer using PowerPoint slides is typically telling students about existing knowledge—but that same slide deck can be used by the student as a diary of the engineering journey, complete with code, video, and pictures. Digital sharing tools such as VoiceThread, Padlet, and Miro help amplify student thinking, whereas one-way communication tools like YouTube, Vimeo, and PowerPoint augment instructor interpretation.

On the hardware side, some tools are designed for students to figure them out through playing. The Arduino company was one of the early promoters of learner autonomy, with an extensive gallery of work from members of their community. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Micro:bit Educational Foundation, SparkFun, Adafruit, Seeed Studio, and a number of other organizations combine instruction on how to get parts of a system to work (recipes) and inspiration to give students confidence to embark on their projects (galleries).

Finally, even classroom hardware can make a difference. Projection screens in the front of the room and instructors looking out at a sea of one hundred individual chairs typically imply passing on the knowledge of experts. Tables (preferably made of whiteboard material to enable scribbles on them) can promote student discussions and encourage their voices.

So how does one balance the two approaches in the classroom? I tend to let students start on a problem and then bring in the thinking of others, because learners will ask good questions that will motivate the lecture. Teaching this way definitely increases classroom stress, because students are required to actively think, and can make those not used to risk-taking feel uncomfortable. But I have always been amazed at where students go when you listen to them and put them in charge. They learn to learn on their own.

Once in an introductory fluids class, some students told me about a syphon they built the previous night to attempt cavitation—and they succeeded. The discussion in class led them to play with syphons, which, in turn, motivated them to learn more theory. Actively switching between play and theory in all classes—from introductory calculus to turbulence modeling—will allow students to learn to think as well as learn how others have thought.

 

Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.