What is it about?
Presently, the complexity of engineering education does not match with the existing knowledge level of most recruited students when they are accepted into engineering departments. It is about the conflict between the education process and less knowledgeable engineering students. This conflict between the education process and the student ability has been adequately accepted, and the literature has discussed the issues, but it has not provided remedies.. The paper gives insight into (individual and combined) plausible reasons for fewer fully competent graduate engineers, taking the specific case study in Turkey. It proposes a generic approach, which can be extended to courses of any university/degree subject. Findings on student learning are provided using a hierarchical decomposition. In this work, Mechanical Engineeering (ME) has been specifically looked into at top-down manner in Turkey. It investigates the possible reasons for the reduced knowledge level of engineering graduates using a systematic method that relies on hierarchically decomposing ME Design (MED) course (MEDco) into its subassemblies. The issues related to the difficulties encountered in the latest version of the textbooks have been examined in this work.
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Why is it important?
Bearing in mind the lack of studies concerning the reasons for the issues at the course level, this study could be regarded as the first attempt to reveal the issues in engineering by looking into the problem from the student’s perspective. Hence, the paper provides a method with an application to identify the possible reasons for issues at four levels. Mostly, recruited students’ low science and mathematics levels are blamed for the reduced quality of engineering graduates. The findings were not agree with this. The main findings indicated that many factors, which contribute to the issues, were more related to teaching materials and policy makers than students. Hence, the new recruits are not fully to blame for the conflict, because there have also been other reasons for the issues within teaching. It identified multiple instances of the reasons such as unnecessary complexity of textbooks, unsolved contradictions even between the technical component design standards and etc.
Perspectives
I hope this article can be useful for those who are interested in finding or determining the reasons for issues in engineering courses. Most recent studies have discussed the topic but these don’t go into as much detail as in this study. The work in this paper carried out close inspection on the MEDco, and then its outcomes in ME project course were studied using the method of hierarchical process decomposition process. Factors that may directly affect the MEDco are considered as ‘‘textbooks’’, ‘‘MEDco success’’, ‘‘project ability/adequacy’’ and ‘‘success factors’’ at the first level of the decomposition. Decomposition of the course into subcomponents and into low level of its components worked well. It provided many reasons for various issues, and found to be useful way to analyse issues of ME. The findings are mostly related to the unnecessary complicacy, and high demands of a ME education, which is incompatible with ever reducing science and mathematics competence amongst recruited degree students. It concludes that students cannot be held totally responsible and fully to blame for the reduced qualifications in engineering education as most of the low level factors contribute to the issues that are related to various authorities.
Prof. Dr. Necdet Geren
University of Çukurova
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This page is a summary of: Mechanical engineering and issues on teaching mechanical engineering design in Turkey, International Journal of Technology and Design Education, May 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s10798-017-9409-0.
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