Dr. Laura Sullivan had this idea. The mother of two young sons didn t have to look very far for her solution. It s actually a very real world kind of experience for my students, Sullivan said.
Engineers learn best when they talk to the consultants who are using their products.
I wanted to set up something that was more an experience than a trial, she explained. So Sullivan, whose oldest son attends Grand Blanc City School, asked a teacher at the school to provide consultants for the experiment. The young consultants came to campus to review the products created by 47 young engineers who addressed issues like storing energy, counting money, understanding volume, relating fractions to models and creating simple circuits. As one Kettering student observed, it was a fun assignment that proved to be a lot of work. This was a pretty non-standard activity for a college course, said Stephen Weber, a freshman from Williamston, Mich., who approved of the instructional method.