2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress shares efforts to better integrate a first-year engineering course within a liberal arts core curriculum. Undergraduate Engineering programs at liberal arts colleges provide a unique opportunity for prospective engineering students to engage in engineering courses that are interdisciplinary between engineering concepts and the applied humanities. This work shares the experiences of a re-designed Introduction to Engineering Course. The motivation to revise the course is twofold: first, to inspire a wider array of students to pursue engineering and, second, to provide a more holistic view of the environmental, social, and historical factors that inflect engineering practice. Past versions of the Introduction to Engineering Course focused on preliminary topics in computer, electrical, materials, and mechanical engineering, along with an overview of what careers in these disciplines entail. By contrast, the course re-design introduces students to engineering subfields by examining the historical, political, and technical development of four key technologies known to affect and be affected by everyday life in America. With each case study, students practice thinking critically about how technologies arise, what problems they are designed to address, how naturally-mined or man-made materials flow through supply chains, and how engineers might respond to the hopes or concerns raised by society at large. Just as students learn to situate technologies in their historical and political context, so too do they contextualize their own worldviews and predilections. This is achieved through self-reflection papers assigned at the start and close of the semester and through mandatory, non-graded weekly forum discussions in which students evaluate present-day technological developments while responding directly to the stated views of their peers with questions intended to stimulate further reflection. In this way, students strengthen their capacity to offer critique together with the capacity to receive such critique themselves. By placing both engineering and themselves in context, the expectation is that students will walk away from the course at the end of the semester better able to articulate what kind of future they wish to see and how engineering can help them and their communities bring that vision to life.