State-of-the-art examples for leading edge education in STEM disciplines

Abstract

Basic courses in Engineering are intended for students to learn the foundations of certain topics, whether their uses and applications will be reviewed or not in the same or in future courses. According to our experience, state-of-the-art examples and exercises within the frontier of knowledge, should be extensively used at any level of every course of the STEM disciplines. This practice promotes several important aspects in education from the student side: development of imagination and creativity, concretion of concepts when applied in industry or some other well-established scenario, questioning the details that conveyed a basic concept from blackboard into fruition and even thought experiments to outperform those state-of-the-art examples. This article emphasizes the importance of employing disruptive, state-of-the-art, appealing and challenging examples on basic courses in Engineering to produce a positive, shocking impact on students and lecturers.