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Using engineering cases in technology education.

Article Excerpt
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Introduction

There has been a great deal of discussion in the past few years about implementing engineering design in K-12 classrooms. Experts from K-12 education, universities, industry, and government officials attended the ASEE leadership workshop on K-12 Engineering Outreach in June of 2004 and came to a consensus on the need to implement engineering in K-12 schools (Douglas, Iversen, & Kalyandurg, 2004). Many leaders in the field of technology education believe that developing technological literacy in students can be best delivered by teaching engineering design (Wicklein, 2006, Lewis, 2005, Dearing & Daugherty, 2004). The use of the engineering design process is stressed throughout Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Study of Technology (ITEA, 2000/2002/2007), especially Standards 8 through 13.

While there may be strong support for teaching engineering concepts to K-12 students, how this knowledge is properly delivered to high school students is still a debatable topic. This article seeks to consider engineering case studies as a logical way to teach the engineering design process to students not commonly familiar with it. Arguments have been made against assigning students to full-scale engineering design problems when they are new to engineering. Often novice engineering students lack the analytical tools necessary for successful development of design solutions to full-sale engineering problems (Petroski, 1998, Dym, 1994). Introducing engineering design to K-12 students through the employment of design case studies is a logical solution.

Design Case Studies Defined

Although design case studies have been used in engineering schools since the late 1960s, the term may be new to those in the field of technology education. Design case studies have a variety of definitions, depending on the source. The general term design case study has several variations in title including engineering cases and case studies. Geza Kardos (1979) says that the terms "engineer case, cases, and case studies are used loosely and interchangeably," (p.1). In a separate article, Kardos (1979) defines engineering cases as "... a written account of an engineering activity as it was actually carried out" (p.1). H.O. Fuchs (1974) defines an engineering case as: "A case is a written account of an engineering job as it was actually done, of of an engineering problem as it was actually encountered" (p. 1). A common...

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