The context of engineering: a SUCCEED course at Georgia Tech

Abstract

In the early part of January 1993, engineers and historians at Georgia Tech joined together to draft a proposal to SUCCEED, a national engineering education coalition funded by the National Science Foundation. This novel collaboration of academics who do not usually work together imagined an experimental course that would integrate humanities and engineering education in order to provide a broad context for understanding the role of engineering and the engineering profession in modern society. Primarily aimed at beginning students in electrical engineering, this pilot project would develop a set of modular units, each one of which incorporate materials on engineering design or on issues related to engineering professionalism, and which would link that information to economic, political or social considerations. In this fashion, the creative work of engineers, past and present, could be analyzed both in terms of technical detail and in terms of the human context in which engineering always takes place. The course was presented at Georgia Tech for the first time in the Spring Quarter of 1995, and it will be repeated in the Winter Quarter of 1996. We present a progress report that describes the planning, organization and objectives of the course, and that concludes with some observations on the work yet to be done in order to make the course materials we have developed usable by others.