Peter Goodhew, an NMITE honorary Professor in its earlier days, writes about the key role of questions in the education of an engineer.
Questions are to be found everywhere in engineering and in society more generally.
NMITE was founded in order to create the type of liberal engineer who understands that the role of engineering in society involves far more than just technical expertise. The vision included the idea that a real engineer would question how and why engineering was being used in society.
They would not want or need to be told things via lectures: They would learn by doing, by asking and by thinking.
When a few of us were considering how we might educate an engineer without telling them anything, it became obvious that the best way of provoking thought is to ask questions.
So in 2017, before a single student had registered to study at NMITE, we tried to think of the best questions to ask a student who was working on a practical project. We came up with nine, which I will reproduce here without all the explanation which went around them. (If you want to read the original short paper, email me at goodhew@liverpool.ac.uk)
They were:
Why are you doing this? (learning, societal need, technical need, timely)
How many? (market analysis, scaling up)
What does it cost? (materials, costings, manufacturing methods, transport)
Who will pay? (individuals, government, business, taxation)
What is the likely impact? (on the environment, on depletion of resources, on society, health, aesthetics, noise)
What are the risks, and how might they be mitigated? (associated with the project itself, the product)
What happens afterwards? (end-of-life disposal, recycling, re-use, what replaces, changes in society)
Which language/country? (target country of use, language of reporting)
How could the project outcome be improved? (better, cheaper, lower/higher impact, lighter)
This still looks to be a pretty useful set of prompts for someone undertaking a project, but more recently I have been collecting a wider set of questions which might be asked – by students or staff – about any engineering activity. Almost by definition an engineering activity involves making something useful, devising or improving a process and – for students – learning how to do these things effectively.
So some of my additional questions are:
How does it work? (“It” might be a device, a component or a theory.)
Can you make your answer more general, so that it applies to other things you might do or make or encounter in the future? (This might involve a bit of maths!)
Can you explain it to a six-year-old? (Because, if not, you probably don’t understand it!)
Who thought of this before you? Did they get it right?
What’s it going to be made of?
How can you mend it when one or more parts fail?
What happens when the power fails?
What did you learn as you tried to answer these questions?
You can probably add many more to this list, but before asking them, please remember that such questions rarely have a single answer or a “right” answer and sometimes we can’t find an answer at all.
An NMITE graduate would be able to cope with all these outcomes.