Anyone walking into the Science Museum immediately encounters the fruits of human ingenuity – but in the form of engineering not science. Vast ingenious machines are testament to human creativity and manufacturing prowess. Science played a part in their development, but engineering made them real.
So why does science grab the glory when engineers do all the work? Engineers have not been good at explaining what they do and how they do it, perhaps letting the fruits of their labour speak for themselves.
But in an era where we need more high-quality engineers, where we need engineers to engage with the public, and we need the public to appreciate and apply engineering thinking, this low profile has to change.
It goes without saying that we will continue to need traditional engineers, just as we will continue to need bridges, buildings, cars and all the other manufactured objects of modern life. But new opportunities are opening up, with novel materials and technologies, and greater interplay between engineering and the life sciences. There are also the ‘unknown unknowns’ to consider – it is hard to predict what new areas of engineering may exist in 50 years’ time.
Over the past 200 years, engineers have made huge contributions to improved longevity and quality of life. However, we now face profound global challenges that engineers (with others) need to address.
Clean water, clean energy and preventing or dealing with the impact of climate change are all grand social challenges that must be priorities for the engineering profession. We need to ensure our future engineers are more socially aware, paying more attention to factors such as sustainability, affordability and accessibility in their design and construction.
More broadly, our socially aware engineer must be prepared to engage in dialogue with the public, and place people at the heart of engineering – not just explaining what engineers do, but listening and responding to public concerns and desires.
This dialogue would be more fruitful if the achievements of engineering and the concept of what it is to be an engineer – how engineers think and act – were more widely appreciated. The caricature of the engineer as the person who fixes the photocopier is deeply embedded.
Schools are an ideal environment in which this identity mismatch can be tackled. Even without radical changes to the curriculum, it is entirely possible to introduce activities into the classroom that illustrate engineering principles, at all stages from primary school upwards.
Fundamental to this shift is the adoption of more appropriate teaching methods, particularly active learning methods and problem-based learning. We are still overly reliant on the ‘chalk and talk’ model – possibly because that’s how we were taught.
In schools, we need teachers who are comfortable with making things and solving problems, in other words with an engineering mindset. They don’t need to be graduate engineers, which is fortunate, because we are not producing enough to staff even a modest fraction of primary classrooms.
We also need to recognise that the power relationship between teacher and learner has shifted. Access to information has been democratised, and ‘digital-native’ students are likely to be more technologically savvy than their teachers.
Rather than play catch up, we need to embrace new technology and be prepared to learn from students about how they might organise themselves, use novel tools and work together to solve problems. Could they acquire their knowledge ‘just in time’ and learn how best to apply it face-to-face with their lecturer?
In addition, many potential students are not competent mathematicians. Is it heretical to suggest that you can be a good engineer without being good at maths? We also need to think about assessment – tick-box exercises capturing factual memorisation are easy to mark, but reveal much less than more sophisticated assessments of people’s thinking skills.
We have been woefully bad at attracting women and other under-represented groups into engineering. Clarifying what engineering means, and providing more opportunities for everyone to practise engineering at an early age, may help to demystify the discipline.
Moreover, a greater understanding of how engineering can make the world a better place may inspire a younger generation. An appreciation that engineering is a ‘high-status’ profession may encourage more young people to see it as a possible career (and encourage more teachers to promote it as an option).
These issues have been taken on by a small number of universities around the world which are now offering ‘liberal engineering’ courses. It is too soon to be confident, but early indications are that these programmes attract more female students, suffer lower dropout and produce highly employable graduates.
We face other challenges. Increasingly, engineering is hidden from view, encased in tinker-resistant black boxes. Practical construction toys are losing out to digital playthings.
These trends are unlikely to change, making it ever more important that we provide opportunities for young people to make things, and to think about the best way to make things. They may not all go on to be engineers, but they will at least better appreciate what engineers do, how they think and why their work is so important.
Professor Peter Goodhew is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Liverpool. He was instigator of the Active Learning Laboratory at Liverpool and author of Teaching Engineering, a guide for university teachers of engineering.