What Engineers Donʼt Learn and Why They Don Learn It:
and How Philosophy Might Be Able to Help

Goldberg, David E. (2008) What Engineers Donʼt Learn and Why They Don Learn It:
and How Philosophy Might Be Able to Help .

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Abstract

This paper presented at WPE-2008 uses an industrial-based senior design as an opportunity to understand what what students don't learn in a fairly traditional cold war engineering curriculum. The paper identifies seven deficient skills: questioning, labeling, qualitative modeling, decomposing, visualizing/ideation, empirical testing, and communicating. The talk also identifies five reasons why engineers don't learn these things, and philosophy plays a prominent role in recifying the problem by aiding in providing conceptual clarity and offering alternative models of rigor.

Keywords:qualitative thinking, category error, engineering epistemology, scalability
Subjects:General Issues: Science Education
ID Code:4531
Deposited By:Goldberg, David E.
Deposited On:23 March 2009