Initial Development Of A Needs Driven Course On Calculation Methods And Problem Solving For Engineering Technology Students

As part of a major curriculum overhaul, our department added a course – ENGT 3050 Problem Solving in Engineering Technology – which was designed to cover skills that we felt students needed to have before leaving our program and that they were not getting from other courses. Most of our curriculum is structured around standard course topics and texts. This course was a departure from that model. In selecting the content for the course, we focused on topics that were not clearly being covered in other required courses and that students needed to know before reaching the workplace. This paper will discuss the author’s experience in the initial development and offering of this course. In its current form, much of the content is based on using math and computer software in the process of solving problems. Based on our current degree requirements, the course content includes topics on graphing and presenting data, data reduction, and basic topics from statistics. Our curriculum overhaul included removal of engineering-level calculus requirements. With this change, some needed material was cut, and the new course covers this to some degree. Overall, the course serves in part as a capstone to our math requirements, with a focus on how to apply the math studied in applications. As envisioned, the course also includes a balance of material on creative problem solving. In practice to date, the course is too heavy on math content, especially in the area of calculus. This has occurred because we are finding that the students have not learned how to use the material studied in the required calculus course. Experience with this course is giving us information on what our students are not learning to use from their math courses, and gives us guidance on how to change the way we teach math skills to our students. With improvement in that area, we can focus more on the broader aspects of solving problems in the workplace.