engineering technology

Teach kids how cool it is that engineers get to MAKE stuff! 

In this episode of The Human Side of Engineering and Product Development, Andy welcomes Randy Mees, the Director of Design, Transcatheter Heart Valves at Edwards Lifesciences. He shares how luck would bring him to the world of engineering and his early experiences with CAD and other tech.

Randy then talks about his approach to tool design and getting the input of operators to get their feedback. As an educator, Randy also discusses the need to get more young people into engineering and make the base skills in machining accessible starting at the high school level.

HUMANIZING MESSAGES

RANDY: Get the input of operators on your designs

"The other person who I felt was the most important was the operator. They're the ones that use my fixture for 8 hours a day and you want to design something for them that they're going to like. If they don't like it, if they're fighting a process, they're not going to have a good day, number one, and then they're probably not going to have a good product at the end of the day."

"So you want to give them something that they're going to like even better. You want to include them into that design process, bring them a prototype. We used to show the 3D model to them and say, what do you think? You think this is going to work? Get their input because they know it far better than I know it."

RANDY: Community colleges are very good for building engineering skills

"My suggestion again, because I'm a huge fan of community college, is to find the local community college. Oftentimes they have those 16-week [CAD or engineering] courses and build up that strength."

Get to know Randy and what he’s up to:

LinkedIn | Website

Learn more about our host and his Human Side:

Andy Deo | Saratech | Saratech.com

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In episode six of Sketch Model, Sara is joined by Olin colleague Erhardt Graeff, assistant professor of social and computer science. In the series so far, we've talked with theorists and historians about why engineering education struggles to include contextual and ethical concerns and about what it looks like in concrete practice to mix ideas in the arts and humanities with engineering in the classroom. In this final episode, Sara and Erhardt discuss the horizon for engineering education as a formative site for "civic professionalism," about Public Interest Technology, and about what happens when students have to face the possibility of not building anything at all.

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
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Learn more about Olin College of Engineering

In episode five of Sketch Model, Sara is joined by Olin colleague Amon Millner, associate professor of computing and innovation and director of the EASE Lab (i.e. extending access to STEM empowerment). In the episode, Sara and Amon talk about how Amon got his start as a young person, why the performing arts mix so well with code, and how he's built a technology lab that reaches both college students and school-aged kids. Millner trained at the University of Southern California, at Georgia Tech and at the MIT Media Lab where he was the co-creator of the Scratch platform, which is a visual and graphical medium for teaching coding widely used in playful ways among young people.

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
Follow Olin College on Twitter
Learn more about Olin College of Engineering

In episode four of Sketch Model, Sara is joined by Mimi Onuoha, an artist and creative technologist who also held a creative residency at Olin as part of the Sketch Model program on Olin's campus. In the episode, Sara and Mimi explore what happens when technologies find their way into art forms, and when questions—strong, open-ended questions—are a hallmark of creative practice, in the things we build and in classrooms where we teach.

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
Follow Olin College on Twitter
Learn more about Olin College of Engineering

In episode three of Sketch Model, Sara is joined by Olin College's Lynn Andrea Stein, professor of computer and cognitive science. In this episode, the podcast takes a look at the origins of our own institution: Olin College of Engineering.

Olin was started a little over 20 years ago to reinvent engineering education for the 21st century. What would engineers need to know and experience? And then what kinds of curricular structures might bring those ideas to life? There was a partner year before the college even opened its doors, where students came to a not-yet-finished campus and thought it through, alongside faculty with a wide latitude and a lot of imagination. We wanted to hear about what that felt like in the 1990s from one of our founding faculty members. Stein takes us to that moment in engineering education more broadly: startup culture, the early days of the internet, and the need for design in engineering education.

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript 

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
Follow Olin College on Twitter
Learn more about Olin College of Engineering

In episode two of Sketch Model, Sara is joined by scholars Matthew Wisnioski and James Malazita, as the series takes a look at the history of engineering education to find some clues about how we got to the familiar pattern of depoliticization in engineering education. Why do social and political concerns about technology come up regularly for engineers only to be smothered pretty easily, by a sense that technological progress is inevitable and impossible to tame?

Wisnioski is an interdisciplinary historian in science technology and society at Virginia Tech, a senior fellow at the Institute for Creativity, the Arts and Technology and a co-founder of the Human Centered Design, Interdisciplinary Graduate Education program. Malazita is assistant professor in science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with an appointment in the program in Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences.

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
Follow Olin College on Twitter
Learn more about Olin College of Engineering

In episode one of Sketch Model, Sara is joined by Erin Cech, associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, where she also has an appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Cech, who's been looking under the hood at engineering education for a long time, has found some counterintuitive and troubling things happening in the engineering classroom. In this episode she'll tell us about it: how engineering students grow less interested in social and civic matters over the course of a four year education and what it might mean to redress those trends.

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
Follow Olin College on Twitter
Learn more about Olin College of Engineering

There are lots of podcasts about the ethics of technology, but Sketch Model is different. During this special 6-part series, host Sara Hendren and her guests will zero in on engineering education and the classroom as a formative site that shapes the ethics of technology. How do students in the much lauded STEM field learn to address the humanistic concerns about technology? The "why" and "should" questions about what they make, whether in code or with robotics or AI. How is it that social and political concerns are so easily cut out of technical training? And what would it look like to bring them back in?

Sketch Model / Presented by Olin College of Engineering is a new audio series about the engineering classroom and how the humanistic disciplines of the arts, the humanities and the social sciences shape the "why" and "should" questions about the technologies we build. The podcast will talk about some of the surprising trends that are happening in engineering education now and will discuss the history of ethics and politics among engineers over the last century.

Download the episode transcript

Sketch Model is created, hosted, and produced by Sara Hendren and edited by Brian Funck.
Follow Olin College on Twitter
Learn more about Olin College of Engineering