"Engineering Education for the 21st Century-Balancing Engineering Science, Information Technology and Multidisciplinary Studies"

Educating engineers for success in the 21 st century workforce will require continually adapting the curriculum subject matter to reflect relevancies to public and corporate stakeholders.The planet's population is growing to unprecedented levels and making vital resources even scarcer.For decades after World War II engineering education tended to focus primarily on engineering science or physics using reductionist analytics.The less mathematical sciences of design, synthesis, systems, organization and planning became relatively minor parts of an undergraduate's studies.In the latter 20 th century, the end of the cold war, the IT revolution and new understandings about the affordability and benefits of manned space travel tended to redirect earlier 20th century research.Engineering research continues to increase in corporate laboratories where the focus is on developing tangible products and services to satisfy the more immediate needs of humankind.Research grants to universities are not likely to command as great of proportion of national income in the 21 st century as in earlier years.Future engineers must be able to work on a variety of pressing and difficult problems such as innovation subject to severe resource constraints.Moreover, attracting students to engineering will require an inspiring vision of the prospect for exciting engineering work such as the space program provided.The nation's new problems will require undergraduate engineers to acquire complementary skills and perspectives of multiple disciplines that more explicitly recognize the practical importance of the human element and technical innovation.Engineers in the 21 st century will face unprecedented global change and rate of change in technology, economics and social institutions.To meet these challenges, recently referred to by the NAE as a gathering storm, engineering education will need to embed more technology and soft skills into traditional science-based engineering courses without reducing practical STEM content and rigor.Engineering faculty will need also to create and develop challenging new multidisciplinary courses that embed engineering science and technology within the context of experiential learning and practice.This paper examines the need for and ways to integrate engineering science, information technology and multidisciplinary work.We describe how we have used the University's Honors Program to provide students with experiential learning in integrating the knowledge and perspectives of their discipline with that of others in the design and development of a virtual product.