Underpinning systems thinking in railway engineering education

Enabling Sustainable Thinking in Undergraduate Engineering Education*

In this paper we address the need for curricular changes that foster sustainable thinking and review a number of engineering curricular changes at selected universities, drawing comparisons to medical and other fields. For each engineering program, we examined the level at which sustainability concepts and active-learning methods were integrated into its curricula. A majority of the universitie...

Systems thinking in biology education

Sciences (SUBS), has worked in the field of teaching cybernetic biology since 1968 and has produced relevant publications. He also introduced systems thinking into concept formation in science education in order to promote transdisciplinary thinking. Part of the ideas and drawings contained in this book have been developed in previous cooperation with Professor Horst Bayrhuber, IPN Kiel, to who...

Perspectives on Systems Thinking in Engineering

Assessing Critical Thinking in Mechanics in Engineering Education

Typically, mechanics education in engineering schools focuses on communicating explicit content to students, but deemphasizes the critical thought that underlies the discipline of mechanics. We give examples of the failure of students to apply basic principles of mechanics in solving problems. We develop assessment tools to measure critical thinking in student work, and how well mechanics textb...

Thinking Technology in order to think engineering education

Our world, in its step of “hyperindustrialisation”, faces what could be called the paradox of technology. If our world is conceived by technologies, they are neither questioned nor thought. Our institute, the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon, does not escape from this paradox. Its aim is to educate engineers by teaching them the use and the design of technical tools whereas techno...