Life Lessons from Engineering - The True Importance of EEE
It’s unrealistic for all of us to be engineers. I mean, it would be a little boring if everyone ended up having the same occupation, right? But, engineering is still valuable for everyone to try. And this isn’t just my biased opinion. Looking through the scientific method and how engineering education is structured, it is clear that integral life lessons are taught. I definitely am only touching on a fraction of them, but I want to highlight these three because they are extremely applicable and, in my opinion, extremely important. I hope that this post conveys why EEE’s mission extends well beyond pushing every student into engineering - rather, we strive to offer a powerful introduction to engineering at a young age - and impart valuable life lessons along the way.
Collaboration
I find it funny sometimes when I look up who invented certain things because it’ll often come up with 5 different people who created almost the same idea or adapted a previous person’s design.
One example is who invented the refrigerator. You can look it up and it’ll come up with Fred W. Wolf in 1914. But, looking further, you’ll see that others also “created” the fridge: Jacob Perkins in 1843, John Gorrie made one in 1853, and Carl von Linde in 1873. Those are just a few of the many names associated with contributing to the refrigerator we know today.
No single person invented the refrigerator, an invention so ubiquitous today. Even if some of those paths ended in dead ends - not very practical or helpful, they eliminated a possibility, carving the path for the final iteration. It was a collaborative effort, whether those scientists realized it at the time or not.
This idea goes far past the invention of the refrigerator. Teamwork is the basis of almost everything we do, and it is essential to success. It’s especially applicable in science and engineering - It’s unreasonable to believe that one person can execute everything all on their own; they need outside input, resources, and/or support for all of the work they are doing.
In other ways, working in a group while creating something can be extremely eye-opening. Hearing other people’s perspectives on how to solve the same problem teaches one of the most important lessons in life: being open-minded. Exposing kids to other perspectives from a young age sets them up to have healthier relationships and make more educated decisions in their futures.
One aspect of collaboration that is not discussed enough is that it teaches people to handle conflict and compassionately handle situations in which they don’t agree with someone they’re working with. Perhaps you experience this with group projects at school, within a sports team, or with coworkers—it is a skill that is necessary for multiple aspects and stages of your life. Engineering is one of them, and it’s a comfortable introduction to teach kids to handle conflict with their fellow collaborators. It gives them a situation to experiment in to find the balance between advocating for their ideas and listening to the other person’s perspective.
Ultimately, collaboration has been one of the most influential things in the history of science and engineering, and still, it is one of the most frequent things we experience each day across many aspects of life. This is why I think it is one of the most valuable lessons that you can learn from engineering - and it’s why every EEE workshop will use teamwork as a starting point for our activity structure.
2. Creativity
Engineering is a unique activity for many reasons. One that really stands out to me, however, is that it is an intersection of both more “left-brained” components—numbers, analysis, methodical thinking—and “right-brained” ideas—creativity, execution, and overarching concepts. “Left-brained” and “right-brained” ideas are often exclusively applied, but engineering finds a way to show how closely related they really are.
But, for people who are typically more used to doing analytical and mathematical thinking, sometimes the idea of creativity can feel a bit foreign. Personally, there have been so many times I’ve been handed an assignment and my teacher has said “be creative.” And, I’ve always felt a little lost. In my opinion, being creative isn’t just a switch to turn on or off like many people frame it to be. I’ve recently realized, however, that it can be practiced and refined as you grow.
The problem behind creativity, as a concept, is that people get the idea of it wrong. Being creative with a drawing, for instance, doesn’t necessarily mean adding more colors or making whimsical shapes and illustrations, it means making it different and—really—making it your own. When you add personality or establish a sense of individuality to your work—whether that be a drawing, an engineering project, an essay for school, or even how you tackle any problem in your life—you are forming your own unique, creative perspective.
Admittedly, it’s hard to know who you are and how to express your ideas through your work, but engineering is a pathway that can lead kids to work toward this understanding. Being inspired by others and adapting their projects, seeing what aspects of engineering and science interest you the most, and forming a productive system of organization and planning that works for you—these are all skills that establish how you can express your personality through your work, past just your work in engineering.
I think creativity is best rehearsed through hands-on action, which is why our programs have huge potential in building more creative and individual minds.
3. Creating Connections
Identifying a problem and knowing the best way to solve it is a task easier said than done. And it’s not just a problem that engineers have to tackle; What do you do if your car starts making a weird noise? How do you approach a conversation when something seems off in a friendship? How can you help yourself feel better if you wake up randomly sore or not feeling well? Some of these can even be a life-or-death situation when it comes to identifying and articulating a certain medical condition to a doctor. But even on a less dramatic scale, these circumstances in which you need to figure out what is wrong and how to move forward happen every day.
This is such an overlooked skill because a lot of people learn it in their elementary school classes and apply it throughout the rest of their education and life; engineering, for example, helps you prepare for these problematic moments by knowing how to analyze a situation and use the information given to you to adapt your creation to produce the desired outcome. If this lesson is usually taught through other things, then, you may be wondering, why am I even including it in my short list of life lessons? I think one reason is because of how important it is; apart from just some of the aforementioned situations, creating connections can help children in their academic careers and almost any occupation they do in their futures. But, the main reason was because of how engineering incorporates this message.
It is an evident lesson in many stages of the scientific method. First, when doing external research on the problem you are trying to solve, you are applying other people’s ideas and creations to support your project. When you’re designing your model, you are connecting your mathematical, scientific, and artistic thinking skills to create a representation of what you will build. But, I think the most critical application of creating connections that are demonstrated in engineering is when you are reaccessing after testing your model.
When you create an engineering project, it’s imperative that something isn’t going to happen the way you thought it would. This is a good “sub-lesson”—I’ll call it—that creating connections ties with during engineering: not everything is going to go according to plan. This is an especially disheartening thing to occur to children (and perfectionists) who want everything to go their way. Creating connections between what went wrong and what information you can use to adapt your creation gives you hope and a way to progress when you get hit with these imperfections in your design. With engineering, creating connections becomes less of a tedious or irrelevant skill that some people claim it to be and, instead, a helpful one.
When doing research to help change or even create your project initially, you are connecting and utilizing your own knowledge to determine the accuracy and relevancy of what you are reading. With so much misinformation online, being able to make connections between the information you know is true—your own experiences, the data you collected, etc—and the information you are hearing is imperative to making decisions. This application of creating a connection is shown again when reaccessing your project, reestablishing this implementation of creating connections within analyzing information.
So really, engineering teaches the value of the lesson of creating connections: thinking about what you are creating through multiple parts of the scientific method, how to move forward when problems arise, and how to work with the information given to you. When a student comes to one of our workshops, they’ll make those valuable connections and immediately realize their importance.
Ultimately, I think that engineering is a unique activity that can give people perspective. Perspective to create their own individual personality and creativity, work with others, and make decisions based on information and connections to previous thinking. Not everyone is going to get the same things out of engineering—and maybe you even disagree with the three aspects that I’ve discussed—but no matter what you do in life, you get some sort of takeaway from it. That is the true importance of EEE programs - that is why what we strive to change is so much grander than “teaching engineering”.
We’re using engineering as our lens to empower students - equipping them with the skills they need to find a better future; no matter what that might end up being.
-Genevieve and the team at EEE
