Growth Industries
After centuries of satisfying the industrial world’s hunger for raw materials, sub-Saharan Africa is making an important shift toward production. As Don Boroughs reports in our cover story, “a new wave of African leaders has shifted toward growing a workforce that can serve the continent’s needs for an expanded telecommunications, agricultural, and transportation infrastructure.” The region has the world’s most rapidly-growing higher-education sector, with engineering a favored field. Nowhere is this happening faster than in Ethiopia, where a headlong drive to build institutes of technology has gotten a little ahead of itself. Labs are overcrowded and underequipped, faculty pay is pitiful by Western standards, and relatively few instructors have doctorates. But Boroughs describes a variety of ways in which resourceful academics are making the best of it by sharing facilities and tapping into the Ethiopian diaspora. Yacob Astatke, an Ethiopian-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at Morgan State University, has organized donations of 70 Mobile Studio Boards from Analog Devices and five Dragino wireless development kits. For Kalid Ahmed, 32, who earned a Ph.D. in France, the prospect of educating Ethiopia’s first generation of materials engineers was a reason to return home.
If engineering too often gets short shrift in public discussions of STEM education, the incorporation of art into engineering studies is seldom mentioned at all. But it’s happening, adding an imaginative dimension to student projects and useful tools for instructors. “By integrating the arts into the engineering program, it gets students away from the rigid nature of solving equations,” William Best, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Lehigh University, tells writer Alice Daniel. Lehigh’s integrated degree in engineering, arts, and sciences, known as IDEAS, is just one of a number of examples of STEAM (STEM plus arts) around the country.
For students who see themselves designing the roads or vehicles of the future, what better laboratory than your own two-lane highway loaded with sensors? Virginia Tech has one. Read about it in Tom Gibson’s fascinating story, “Driver’s Ed.”
We hope you enjoy the March-April Prism. We welcome your comments and suggestions.
Mark Matthews
m.matthews@asee.org