How To Do an Engineering Problem

George Heller, shown at left, is an alumnus of TCC and a current student in the Mechanical Engineering department of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. He is also a blacksmith.

George is acting as the liason between TCC and the FSU ASME chapter this year, so he attends most club meetings. He will gladly share what he has learned there, as he did last week.



Information presented at the 20 April meeting:

Before the meeting even began, George shared one of the things he learned this semester: How to do a problem, engineer style. He was pleased to point out that some of the steps are ones he learned in my class, but his real point was that a correct answer would not be given full points if it was found while skipping some steps that a physicist like me will normally omit. That may be why he was laughing.

Side comment: I suspect he never took a class from Doug Jones. Students who have taken a class from Doug Jones will understand this comment, although even Doug does not emphasize some of those points because they rarely appear in math problems.

The image above is clickable, but the one below might be more readable. The point he emphasized the most was step 1. There is no explicit penalty for not reading each word (emphasis added by George in the original), but you might get zero for a problem if you miss a key adjective or participle. A careful, close reading of each problem is crucial, and might be a point I will emphasize in the fall.

I already emphasize step 2, primarily as a result of past conversations with engineering faculty about what weaknesses students bring with them from physics classes. George added that you would lose 5 points if the right pictures are not drawn, and drawn well, whether your answer is right or not. Turning words into pictures is as important as turning words into equations (which are steps 3 and 4). He added that you would lose one point for each given value you did not specify (with units) in step 3, and lose a point if your specification of the equations was incomplete in step 4.

Steps 5, 6, and 7 (what students correctly consider "solving" the problem) should be automatic by the time you get out of TCC, so you will get the right answer if you do the first parts correctly. That is, in fact, the reason for the emphasis on the work that has to be done before you can "solve" the problem.

Finally, a point will be taken off if you do not box your answer.



Thanks, George!