The Pratt School of Engineering will introduce curriculum changes for its undergraduate students beginning next fall, in the hopes of both generating greater collaboration among departments and focusing on the practice of engineering earlier in the undergraduate experience.
The greatest immediate changes will include a new core freshman curriculum as well as revised mathematics and physics requirements.
The curriculum changes came from a committee assembled in 2001 by Anderson-Rupp Professor Barry Myers, director of graduate studies of biomedical engineering. The committee, charged with evaluating the current undergraduate program, was composed of members of the engineering departments and student representatives responsible for collecting data from their classmates.
Myers said the committee found several aspects of the curriculum that needed improvement--including the general first-year experience, cross-disciplinary experience, the mathematics core and the computer science program.
According to Senior Associate Dean for Education Tod Laursen, the greatest immediate change in the curriculum will be for first-year students, who starting next year must fit seven out of their eight courses into a new program across departmental lines--two math courses, one chemistry course, one physics course, one computation course, one course in the humanities or social sciences and a Writing 20 course, like all freshmen must take.
"We are hearing from students... that a lot of students come into Pratt and do not know what aspect of engineering they want to do," Laursen said. The new first-year program of study is designed to give greater flexibility to undecided freshmen, he added.
Another attempt to address this indecision will be a pass/fail, half-credit seminar that freshmen will be encouraged to take, which will serve as an introduction to engineering's various fields. The course is currently available to students, but it will be expanded when more classroom space is made available after the opening of the Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences building in the fall.
Laursen said the interdisciplinary nature of the freshmen curriculum will also allow students who are more sure of their major to work with students and professors in other fields as preparation for their future work.
In addition to the cross-departmental work, administrators also hope to provide students with the design skills they will need as professionals.
"Overall, the most important thing we are trying to do is to get the design experience of our engineers into the first couple of years at their curriculum at Pratt," said Kristina Johnson, dean of Pratt. "Engineers... create and apply knowledge to solve important problems that society cares about. If that's what we do, then let's get our students involved in solving problems early."
Johnson said the traditional path for engineers is to fulfill basic math and physics requirements in the first year and then slowly progress through the next two years toward capstone projects senior year, which involve hands-on design work for the first time.
"It is just backwards," she said. "We should be introducing engineering students to the thrill of design by their first year, or by their second year at the latest."
As a part of the revamped course requirements for freshmen, the old computation requirement will be "broadened significantly" to better expose students to how computers are used in real lab situations, Laursen said. The course, Engineering 53, will continue to use MATLAB--a technical computing program for high-performance numeric computation and visualization--as a foundation of study.
The common first-year curriculum will also include a unification of the mathematics requirement, which Laursen noted currently differs between departments. Under the new plan, all engineering students will have to complete the same mathematics core regardless of their major.
Developed between Pratt and the Mathematics department, the major change will be the implementation of two new courses, Math 107 and 108. David Morrison, chair of the mathematics department, said these two courses will be a mixture of Math 104, 111 and 114. The first course, Math 107, will be offered in the spring.
"We are running three or four sections of the first half of the new course and we are trying to steer a third to a half of the students involved out of [Math] 111 and into this new course, which is [Math] 107," Morrison said.
Morrison was especially excited about how MATLAB could be applied to mathematics in the two new core courses.
"The students are now exposed to the new MATLAB [program] when they are freshmen, so we will be able to use MATLAB in 107 and 108 as a really good aid to teaching and learning," he said.
Laursen noted that "a lot of the changes that we are planning to make are going to be phased in over time." He gave as an example Engineering Innovations, a course centered on prototype design that will be offered for freshmen in Spring 2005.
"It is going to allow each student to get access to computer aided design software," Laursen said. "We want students to design prototypes and test their designs. What we are hearing loud and clear is that part of the reason that students come here is that they like to build things. We are going to provide this in the first year and will be integrating design in a more critical way throughout their curricula."
Myers said he was pleased that the school had decided to implement so many of his committee's suggestions.
"Our goal was to examine those experiences and ask if they are as good as they could be," said Myers. "I am excited and happy to see... that each of our recommendations is coming into place."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.