A number of years ago, I was given a link to a website that was quite enlightening (no pun intended). I will have to look for that site, but the teaser video is right here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334
Now, a little background is in order. Apparently the year before this video was made, some Harvard researchers trying to look into what is being taught versus what is being learned asked a bunch of Harvard economics and related grads at commencement some really, really basic questions that had a tiny, inconsequential twist to them. What they found was that a large fraction of people couldn't deal with the twist. So the next year they devised the experiment in the above video and went to an MIT commencement.
They have gone one to do other experiments involving kids of various ages and reveal some extremely unexpected, yet very common, ways in which what we teach is completely misunderstood by so many.
Their point, of course, is that we are teaching things wrong. While I agree, they seemed to be stuck on pedogocial issues that ignored what I think would solve a lot of these things -- people should get an engineering degree unless they have spent some serious time designing and building and testing and demonstrating lots of different electrical projects across a broad spectrum of the EE world. The projects don't have to big or elaborate, they just have to be real.
When I first saw the video, my first thought was, "Okay, so here is an engineering grad (and most were EE grads, but not all -- which isn't mentioned in this video snippet) that has never got their nose out of a book long enough to open a cheap, old-fashioned flashlight to see how it works. They would have seen right before them that the bulb is almost always touching the positive terminal of the battery directly and that a wire connects the side of the bulb to the negative terminal. That's the kind of thing that most people that WANT to become EE's discovered sometime around 5th grade. I don't recall exactly how old I was, but I distinctly remember taking the batteries and bulb/reflector assembly out of a flashlight case and making it light by using a single wire to complete the connection.
Makes you wonder how many of those MIT grads (and replace the school name with any school name you want) went into EE because they had a passion for electrical engineering, and how many of them went into EE because someone convinced them that companies throw lots of money at anyone with an EE degree, particularly from someplace like MIT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ve23i5K334
Now, a little background is in order. Apparently the year before this video was made, some Harvard researchers trying to look into what is being taught versus what is being learned asked a bunch of Harvard economics and related grads at commencement some really, really basic questions that had a tiny, inconsequential twist to them. What they found was that a large fraction of people couldn't deal with the twist. So the next year they devised the experiment in the above video and went to an MIT commencement.
They have gone one to do other experiments involving kids of various ages and reveal some extremely unexpected, yet very common, ways in which what we teach is completely misunderstood by so many.
Their point, of course, is that we are teaching things wrong. While I agree, they seemed to be stuck on pedogocial issues that ignored what I think would solve a lot of these things -- people should get an engineering degree unless they have spent some serious time designing and building and testing and demonstrating lots of different electrical projects across a broad spectrum of the EE world. The projects don't have to big or elaborate, they just have to be real.
When I first saw the video, my first thought was, "Okay, so here is an engineering grad (and most were EE grads, but not all -- which isn't mentioned in this video snippet) that has never got their nose out of a book long enough to open a cheap, old-fashioned flashlight to see how it works. They would have seen right before them that the bulb is almost always touching the positive terminal of the battery directly and that a wire connects the side of the bulb to the negative terminal. That's the kind of thing that most people that WANT to become EE's discovered sometime around 5th grade. I don't recall exactly how old I was, but I distinctly remember taking the batteries and bulb/reflector assembly out of a flashlight case and making it light by using a single wire to complete the connection.
Makes you wonder how many of those MIT grads (and replace the school name with any school name you want) went into EE because they had a passion for electrical engineering, and how many of them went into EE because someone convinced them that companies throw lots of money at anyone with an EE degree, particularly from someplace like MIT.