Title:

Thoughts on Meeting the Needs of Undergraduate Engineering Students

Speaker:

Dr. Warren Seering

Affiliation:

Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, Cambridge, MA

When:

Thursday, September 30, 2010 at 11:00:00 AM   Add to Calendar

Where:

MARC Building, Room Auditorium

Host:

Dr. William Singhose
singhose@gatech.edu
404-385-0668

Abstract

We all generally agree that the purpose of our undergraduate educational programs in engineering is to provide our students with the best possible preparation for their future endeavors. But we don’t always agree on what course content will best address this purpose. In fact, we generally have limited data regarding what our students’ future endeavors will be and about what knowledge and skills those endeavors require. In the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, we have undertaken a process to investigate the future needs of our graduates and to change the curriculum accordingly. This process has led to some interesting and useful insights about what knowledge and skills best serve our graduates and to an array of plans for modifying our curriculum to be more in line with the students’ needs. Reaching agreement on these plans and then implementing them is another matter. In this seminar I will review our process for determining what material brings the most value to our students and show some results that emerged. Then I will share some of the changes that have been proposed to the curriculum and discuss our adventures to date as we have tried to make some of those changes.

Biography

Warren Seering is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Engineering Systems at MIT. He received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1978 and in that year joined the MIT faculty. His research has focused on product design and development, dynamic systems, and robotics. He has taught courses in design, product development, applied mechanics, system dynamics, and computer programming and numerical methods. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Head of the Advisory Board of the International Design Society, and holder of the Weber-Shaughness Chair in the School of Engineering at MIT. Professor Seering has held visiting appointments at Cambridge University, Cal Tech, The University of California at Irvine, The University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University. From 1991 to 2001 he served as Guiding Professor for the Cambridge Basic Research Laboratory, an independent laboratory sponsored by the Nissan Motor Company to study the visual and cognitive processes associated with driving. He has been a consultant to numerous companies on questions concerning design, robotics, and automation. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Pi Tau Sigma, and is on the editorial boards of The International Journal of Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing; The Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing; Research in Engineering Design; IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering; and Design Studies.