Engineering in the Modern World: A Freshmen Course for Engineering Students and All Other Students

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9354510 Billington This proposal seeks to provide a textbook and teaching materials for an introductory-level engineering course of an interdisciplinary nature that seeks to attract students into engineering, and to educate non-engineering students in engineering. This new course is aimed at freshmen engineering students, at students interested in pre-college teaching careers, goals and open to all students in college. The course describes the 200-year transformation of American society through the innovations of large-scale structures, powerful machines, continental networks of communication and power, and industrial processes all culminating in the complex world of the late twentieth century. The course also introduces students to techniques for more effective communication by written, oral, and visual means. This proposal is to develop a set of teaching units, to test them at several institutions, and to complete a textbook. The materials will introduce students to the scientific bases for engineering, the social context within which modern engineering arises, and the intimate relationship between engineering and modern culture. Efforts will also be made to make engineering more accessible to women and underrepresented minorities.