Promoting Systems Thinking In Engineering And Preengineering Students
Rashmi Jain, Keith Sheppard, Elisabeth McGrath, B. Gallois
Abstract
The context of engineering is one dominated by systems. In order to better prepare graduates with a systems perspective and the competencies to be effective in system design, we discuss initiatives to promote the development of systems thinking, both in undergraduate and K-12 communities. This paper describes vertically-integrated curriculum innovation, in which graduate-level coursework spawned a pilot program to embed systems in a core engineering design course for undergraduates with its resulting adoption and extension to a core design thread, and a resulting high school curriculum development and dissemination effort which has followed. These efforts have also prompted educational research to develop the academic underpinnings of the relatively under-developed scholarly foundations of systems engineering.