

Re-Engineering Engineering Education - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?ex=1348804800&en=483a161f504e678e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

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DocSavage
Interesting article. Olin sounds like a school built on project or problem-
based education. That approach helps you stay motivated and connected to real-
world applications. (A major reason why problem-based approaches were adopted
by med schools, even for first-year education.) The difficulty is how to
educate students on the base of knowledge that must be mastered if they are
only learning the bits relevant to a given problem. Or maybe the approach
assumes that mastering core knowledge of any domain is difficult if not
futile, due to changing and increasing knowledge, so best to teach them to
learn what they need to know.

I've occasionally seen some project-based courses at traditional universities
that fit the Olin theme. This new Facebook course would be one example:
[http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/9/25/facebookMovesInt...](http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/9/25/facebookMovesIntoTheClassroom)

A more advanced example was a course offered at Stanford Bioengineering last
year. About 15 students (mostly graduate) were taught how to model blood flow
using 3D medical images, and half of the semester was spent on class projects
where five teams built and simulated their own models of clinically-relevant
conditions. They did an amazing job, and I would think they learned quite a
bit. (You can see their presentations here: <https://simtk.org/home/bioe484>)

It's funny that Stanford, like Olin, was established as a tuition-free
educational experiment. Wonder how long tuition remains free at Olin :)

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yters
I wish more courses were taught this way. I became interested in programming
because I wanted to make games, and that naturally lead me to learn higher
math to do 3d graphics. Plus, this gave me the background of trying to solve
some important problems myself, so the solutions I was taught in school made
sense and stuck a lot easier.

I think it would be possible to base a comprehensive education around making a
computer game. Comp Sci would provide the technical and theoretical
background, while classes such as history, english, art, etc. would provide
the material for the game. This gets around the problem of a person having to
waste comp sci time on non comp sci game related problems, and they learn to
integrate everything they learn to a much higher degree. Plus, it'll be more
fun to grade their work.

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dmpayton
As an Engineering major, I really wish I could go to this school. However, as
a startup founder, I really wish I wasn't bogged down with school (Not that
I'm saying school is bad, it just takes up much more of my time than I'd like
it to).

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aswanson
About time. I brought this up a ways back:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37850>

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pixcavator
It took centuries and a lot of very smart people to develop calculus and now
students are expected to learn all that while building a golf ball machine.

