The program, part of the NSF-sponsored Foundation Coalition, emphasizes curriculum integration and team work. The most striking result of the program is the attitude of the students at the end of the freshman year. Compared to students in the traditional curriculum, students from the experimental program take more responsibility for learning and work considerably harder. Perhaps you've even said it yourself. I remember taking courses in which I had absolutely no interest.
Antidotal evidence says yes.
And the gap between our delivery style and the delivery style to which our students have become accustomed affects the credibility of our message. Students don't doubt our sincerity when we say that it is absolutely vital for an engineer to understand the concepts supporting the answer from the computer. But the foreign nature of our delivery tells the students that it is important for engineers of our generation, not theirs. While the difference between an engineering decision and a computer output is self evident to us, it is not at all evident to our students, few of whom have ever been paid to make decisions. Rather than competing with the entertainment industry, we should exploit a major difference between our functions.