Some activities are core to an engineering education, like applying a theoretical model to make a design decision. Other parts of the education only require the graduate to ‘have an appreciation’ for them. For example, a mechanical engineer needs an ‘appreciation’ for manufacturing processes; a software engineer needs an ‘appreciation’ for how hardware works; et. c. When we want to impart an ‘appreciation’, what do we really want?
In the example of manufacturing processes, the mechanical engineer will use their appreciation to design a product or process to be ‘manufacturable’. This is called ‘design for manufacture’. Someone else will do the manufacturing, but the design must take the manufacturing process into account. So one can use an appreciation. But what is it?
Functionally, when in use, an ‘appreciation’ is adequate to make an informed decision. In a more basic example, knowing how to order food doesn’t require the skill of preparing the food. But if you’ve never prepared food, then you may struggle to make basic decisions about what food to order if you have constraints like time, cost, and dietary requirements (which foods have wheat in them?!). This means you need some hands-on experience to ‘have an appreciation’, even though that experience is not designed to train you to professionally carry out the duty. You don’t need to train to be a chef in this example.
Undergraduate mechanical engineering students need to gain an appreciation for manufacturing processes by having a go at them. The aim is not to complete an apprenticeship and become a master craftsperson. But having no experience at all is also not adequate.
So an appreciation is somewhere between being professional at something, and having no exposure at all. But the key feature is that you have to actually do it yourself, even if you don’t end up professionally qualified.
A lot of the things graduates need to ‘have an appreciation of’ are things that, in some fabulous olden days, students already knew. For example students had already used a spanner to change a wheel; wired a plug; used salt to change the boiling point of water; and so on. Academia, for science and engineering at least, was a place to learn theory to complement worldly experience. Now we bring in undergraduates en masse, after turning the handle in a maths A-level and promising them exciting prospects at university; then ‘suddenly’ we need to provide them with ‘an appreciation’ of things that universities haven’t traditionally taught.
The need won’t die away soon, so we need to learn to meet it. How prevalent is this need? If you scratch the surface, it’s not a new need and it’s not outside the traditional scope of a university. Engineers need an ‘appreciation’ of mathematics, and advanced numerical modelling, and software engineering, and computer graphics, and business, and management, and intellectual property, and so on.
In fact, an entire engineering degree is really just to have an ‘appreciation’ of engineering. When students graduate, they realise that they know essentially nothing. But they have an appreciation of what they don’t know. If they work on a nuclear power station design, or a rocket or a robot, they know what to start learning. They can brush off their applied maths textbook, or their drivetrain design guide, revisit them, and start developing them further with their application in mind. They can begin estimating, approximating, modelling, predicting, and making engineering judgements — all the things modern engineers do. But they can only do this if they’ve had at least some experience doing it themselves.
Perhaps what we need to improve is not providing the experience to have ‘an appreciation’ for whatever we teach, but we just need to emphasise to our students that what they will get from their experience is a basic appreciation for what is involved. We could start by renaming our degrees — saying ‘master of engineering’ is a bit flattering.
Teaching Engineers 