New first-year courses integrate foundational math and physics with modern engineering challenges | Academics - Princeton University

Princeton Professor Andrew Houck’s calculus students had just finished grappling with a set of equations on the forces of tension and gravity when he pulled a large pendulum back to his shoulder and let it go, continues Princeton University.

Professor Andrew Houck teaches a calculus course, “The Mathematics of Shape and Motion.”
Photo: Tori Repp/Fotobuddy

The copper disk swayed back and forth in front of the blackboard as Houck directed the students to time its swings. He later explained that the math describing the pendulum’s motion could be used to tackle practical problems such as using vibrations of atoms to detect pollutants or minimizing the shaking of skyscrapers in an earthquake. 

Houck’s course, “The Mathematics of Shape and Motion,” is part of a new sequence of courses for first-year undergraduates in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. The courses present the same math and physics as more traditional course offerings, but place a greater emphasis on problem-solving in the context of modern engineering challenges.

Houck, a professor of electrical engineering, said faculty members wanted to provide students with more meaningful exposure to engineering in their first year.  Beginning in 2014, he chaired a strategic planning committee that reviewed the engineering school’s undergraduate program, and later led a team of faculty who developed the new courses. The courses were piloted during the 2017-18 academic year with the aim of boosting student retention rates in engineering.

“Over the years, huge numbers of students who wanted to be engineers have taken themselves out of the game,” he said. With the new approach, “they’re going to be engineers, and they are going to do amazing things.”...

During the planning process, Houck and his colleagues concluded that, by building on these students’ interest and enthusiasm for engineering, a new set of courses could help increase retention. 

Houck noted that a disproportionate number of students who opt to leave the school are from groups underrepresented in engineering, contributing to the “leaky pipeline” that impedes diversity in the field. The conventional first-year curriculum contributed to the leak, Houck said, and the school was determined to make improvements. 

A major goal of the new courses, Houck explained, is “to have a diversity of approaches so that students can find the right onramp into the school of engineering — so that we don’t just filter away students for whom the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. We want students to leave engineering only if they find something else that’s even more exciting to them.”

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Source: Princeton University