The most important thing Amos Meeks learned in engineering school was not engineering.
It was to talk to people, and to listen to them.
Now, just a year after graduating from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Mr. Meeks is the co-founder and chief technology officer at a company that produces low-cost scales designed for wheelchair users.
That idea came from a standard class at Olin that focuses not on designing a product, but on simply asking people about their lives and learning from their answers to identify unmet needs.
“At almost no point do you actually do any kind of what people would normally think of as engineering,” Mr. Meeks said. “But I think that is a really important part of engineering.”
The program at Olin is among a series of attempts at universities nationwide to teach undergraduates to think more broadly and aggressively about how they can help solve real-world problems. The strategy is proving popular, helping institutions boost enrollment and helping students find jobs.
It can be seen at other career-focused campuses, such as the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, where one class invented a cheap roofing material for poor villagers in Haiti. And it can be seen at liberal-arts institutions like Agnes Scott College, which has just begun a first-year program emphasizing interdisciplinary problem-solving skills.
For too long, “engineering and technology has been divorced from other disciplines,” said Elaine Meyer-Lee, associate vice president for global learning and leadership at Agnes Scott. Research “needs to be moving the world ahead and making the world a better place in some way,” said Richard E. Stamper, interim vice president for academic affairs at Rose-Hulman.
Yet that’s still a relatively rare concept. “At most academic institutions — though certainly not all — students receive no or very little training in how to translate their work, either to a larger audience or to actionable policy steps,” said Bethany A. Teachman, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Ms. Teachman helped compile a special section of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science looking at ways that behavioral science could be used to deliver social benefits.
‘A Blank Sheet of Paper’
Mr. Meeks’s company, Lilypad Scales, is an example of both the potential and the challenges of teaching students to apply research. The idea for Lilypad grew out of a 2012 project in a mandatory sophomore course at Olin called “User Oriented Collaborative Design.”
Rather than being told what to design, or even just to design something, the students are asked to start by identifying a group of people whose lives they want to change. It’s the difference between “design-based projects” and the more common “project-based learning,” said Olin’s president, Richard K. Miller. “A design-based project starts with a blank sheet of paper, not a paint-by-numbers diagram.”
The students in Mr. Meeks’s class chose to concentrate on elderly people, and then spent a couple of hours interviewing residents of an assisted-living facility near the campus. From that, the students learned that being dependent on wheelchairs makes it tougher to avoid weight gain. It’s tougher even to measure body weight — a widespread problem for wheelchair users often not recognized by those who walk.
That’s where the engineering finally came in. The students set about designing an electronic carpet that could separate out the weight of the wheelchair and wirelessly transmit the reading to a phone.
“And now,” Mr. Miller said, “they’re on fire to learn what pressure sensors are, how radio transmitters work, and how you write software for the iPhone.”
Rose-Hulman’s approach has some key similarities. There, in a “grand challenges” course, the students are given a specific place in the world and asked to research the local population and figure out a technology that might help them. That’s led to classes designing filters to clean water in Kenya and inventing a process for converting plastic trash into roofing tiles in Haiti.
As at Olin, an interdisciplinary team of teachers provides instruction in specific fields as the students grasp the context of the problem at hand. To make the Haitian roofing tiles, for instance, the class got “some on-the-fly teaching on heat transfer,” so they could figure out how much reflected and concentrated solar heat they’d need to melt plastic, said one Rose-Hulman student, Christopher J. Schenck, a junior from Terre Haute.
‘We want students to learn something in one domain and be able to apply it in a completely different one. That’s what knowledge transfer is.’
Agnes Scott is newer to the world of interdisciplinary problem-based learning, and its approach is more basic than those of Olin and Rose-Hulman. For a now-mandatory first-year course, students choose from a variety of topics — such as America’s cultural influence on Europe, gender and music, and the Bible and human rights in nearby Atlanta. Each class examines how the academic methods and approaches common to one discipline might inform the study of another one, with an eye to recognizing the crossover skills necessary for many real-world challenges in complex problem-solving.
“We want students to learn something in one domain and be able to apply it in a completely different one,” said Lilia C. Harvey, a professor of chemistry and associate vice president for academic affairs at Agnes Scott. “That’s what knowledge transfer is.”
Liberal-arts colleges have always valued academic breadth and integration, but haven’t always done enough to put that into practice, said Ms. Meyer-Lee. “So that’s where we’re catching up,” she said.
The Human Dimension
Even in the more-advanced programs, it’s tough to do everything in four years. Rose-Hulman lets its students continue a single project across different courses and academic years, sometimes all the way into their senior “capstone” presentations. Still, Mr. Schenck and his classmates never made it to Haiti to test their idea in the field. Instead they are leaving that to some collaborators at Clemson University to hopefully try out.
Tackling society’s most important problems, said Anneliese Watt, a professor of English at Rose-Hulman, is not the priority at the undergraduate level. “We’re ultimately educators, and so what’s most important to us is what the students learn in the course,” she said. “Really honestly, solving the problems, I think, is secondary to us.”
Job preparation is also a priority. Jacob N. Hiday, a senior biomedical-engineering student at Rose-Hulman, led a project in which students measured paper-towel use in campus bathrooms and tested out various strategies for reducing waste. The work was part of a class in Six Sigma, a widely used business strategy for making systems and processes more efficient.
After each group in the class made its presentation, Mr. Hiday said, the teacher encouraged the students to copy-and-paste the best elements into a single document. “That way, we could have our own very professional-looking document in the end,” he said. “We would have something very presentable for potential employers.”
The concept of social value remains the most difficult aspect of problem-solving, said Mr. Miller, of Olin. It’s relatively easy to teach students to consider the feasibility and the viability of a project idea, he said. Adding the human dimension — that is, determining whether a solution will be seen as acceptable and desirable — takes much more work.
The best answer is to consider all three elements as part of problem-solving, and “to repeat that framework over and over and over again in every semester, so that they start projects by just thinking of the world that way,” Mr. Miller said.
“Science has leaped way ahead, and what we know about ethics and about human behavior has not,” he said. “It’s stuck back a long ways back in the past.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
