KEENzine2

21 ISSUE TWO Missouri - Rolla (now the Missouri University of Science & Technology). “When I graduated, there were a couple of things that really frustrated me,” he notes. “The first was that I didn’t really understand how the various courses I took fit together or related to each other. I also did not have a concept for how these courses applied to practical problems. My education was outstanding in learning basic principles and fundamental ideas in these topical areas, but I just didn’t know why they were useful.” Ebel resolved to give his students a more connected learning experience, if possible. He recognized that an entrepreneurial approach can be a unifying element in curriculum development, and began to prepare a rigorous laboratory course to complement his Signals & Systems lecture course. By design, this lab draws connections with other areas of EE and requires students to engage in multidimensional thinking. The result is a laboratory curriculum that requires students to: • Work with problems that are not well-defined and do not necessarily have a single correct solution • Develop an understanding of how the ideas presented in the lecture relate to the real world • Combine a number of skills such as computer programming, collecting/generating data, assessing and modeling data, system design, technical writing, etc., to see how these activities intertwine • Learn how to work in groups and interact with people with varying personalities and skill sets • Develop an understanding of how to self- organize as an engineering group. The original lab focused on voice pattern analysis; students recorded their own vowel sounds, examined the spectral content, and identified particular patterns. The new lab requires students to investigate the market for commercial speech recognition. Through their research and testing, they discovered the vast worldwide potential for such technology – and got excited about it. “At first, I viewed this as an experiment,” Ebel says. “What I found surprised me. The laboratory projects energized the students and made them much more interested in learning. I heard comments like, ‘I spend more time on this class than all my others, but I really like it.’ Not only did the activities motivate the students, but this lab also changed the way they thought about the lecture class.” Exposing students to an entrepreneurial mindset had additional benefits. “I discovered that when students were interviewing for summer internships or for jobs near graduation, they talked about their experiences in this lab more often than any other experiences they had,” Ebel says. “That was a game changer for me.” Converted, Ebel now urges other engineering institutions and faculty to embrace entrepreneurial engineering. “The truth is that at many universities, education has remained relatively unchanged for many years. Courses involve instructor lectures, well-defined homework with singularly correct answers, and test questions that are mostly the same. This activity, repeated over many courses, instills the mindset that engineering is about solving well-defined problems that have singularly correct solutions. “In that sense, we unknowingly crush any creative thinking from our students’ minds and turn them into robots,” he adds. “They’re great at solving specific math/science/engineering problems, but can’t think on their feet, don’t have a vision for the future, and struggle to get their arms around problems that are not fully defined.” Ebel believes that integrating KEEN principles can be a unifying factor that brings together different elements within the discipline while broadening the learning experience. “Students with an entrepreneurial mindset think creatively and apply their technical knowledge more effectively, which will make them better engineers in a world where technology is rapidly accelerating,” he observes. “For university professors, I believe that teaching multidimensional thinking to students is every bit as important as any specific research contribution we can make.” CONNECTIONS