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Books by Celeste Baine
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Engineers Make a Difference: Motivating Students to Pursue an Engineering Education
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Engineering Principles Teacher's Guide
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Engineering Graphics Teacher's Guide
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Aeronautical Engineering Teacher's Guide
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Civil Engineering Teacher's Guide
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Teaching Engineering Made Easy: A Friendly Introduction to Engineering Activities for Middle School Teachers
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The Musical Engineer: A Music Enthusiast's Guide to Engineering and Technology Careers
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The Fantastical Engineer: A Thrillseeker's Guide to Careers in Theme Park Engineering - Second Edition
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High Tech Hot Shots: Careers in Sports Engineering
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Is There an Engineer Inside You?: A Comprehensive Guide to Career Decisions in Engineering |
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50 Reasons to Teach Engineering
This list could also be called, “50 Reasons to Become an Engineer.” They work hand in hand.
With a little creativity, any one of these reasons can become a lesson or discussion about engineering careers and serve as a catapult to further exploration.
- 48 countries (2.8 billion people) could face fresh water shortages by 2025.
- To save the rainforests.
- Population in developed countries will age and engineers can help develop assistive technologies so aging people can maintain healthy, productive lifestyles.
- To give the underserved a clear path to family wage careers.
- To give students whose talents lie with the concrete rather than the abstract an avenue to success.
- To make sure students who excel at abstract academics can make the transition to concrete applications and specific problem-solving.
- To give women another venue for success.
- To enlighten students who don’t know what engineering is about.
- To save rare or exotic animals from extinction.
- To educate a potential President of the United States.
- To help the energy crisis by finding new ways to produce or store solar, wind, wave, geothermal and other sources of energy.
- To find ways to make nuclear waste non-toxic.
- To develop safe nuclear energy.
- To help find a cure for AIDS.
- To help develop new medicines for numerous diseases.
- To invent smaller, more affordable computers.
- To make better theme parks and safer roller coasters.
- To keep up with the technology needs of society.
- So the U.S. won’t lose all its power to other countries.
- To give students the tools they need for their futures.
- To reverse engineer the brain.
- To counter the violence of terrorists.
- To improve methods of instruction and learning.
- To create better virtual reality systems.
- To capture carbon dioxide.
- To sustain the infrastructure of cities and living spaces.
- To explore other galaxies.
- To understand more about our planet.
- To reduce our vulnerability to assaults in cyberspace.
- To prevent devastation from hurricanes and other natural disasters.
- To improve transportation on land, sea and air.
- To improve our connectivity and ability to communicate with family and friends.
- To help us save money on everything.
- To keep us safe at home and in other countries.
- To lessen our vulnerability to disease.
- To improve the quality of the air we breathe.
- To help our pets live longer.
- To aid veterinarians in caring for animals.
- To make food taste better.
- To make food better for our health.
- To prevent car accidents with better traffic infrastructure.
- To create greener buildings and systems that minimize our footprint on the Earth.
- To understand the oceans and their ability to help us.
- To reduce the impact of war.
- To lessen the need for war.
- To enhance the beauty of our surroundings.
- To have better furniture and computer peripherals that reduce our risk of carpal tunnel or back pain.
- To save the polar bears and other endangered species.
- To get more people where they need to go quickly, safely and conveniently.
- To decrease the incidence of disease and famine.
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Can you think of more?
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Posted by Celeste Baine on December 2, 2008
Talkback
From John Lyons - To make optimal use of our God given intellect and talent for the betterment of the entire spectrum of the human condition. You are doing a fantastic job.
John
Posted on December 2, 2008 at 12:41 pm PST
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From Sabin Colton - Hi, I appreciate your 50 reasons and support programs for introducing my students to engineering.
However, our Reasons 25 and 48 are misleading and I thought you should know why.
CO2 is not a greenhouse gas as such a thing does not exist. CO2 was higher, over 440 ppm in the 1940's, even hitting 550 a few times, and nothing happened. Actually it did, the planet's temperature plunged while CO2 was high.
The idea that we are causing the rise in CO2 ignores the fact that the oceans' contribution dwarfs ours, CO2's half-life in the atmosphere is 5-10 years, not the 200 lauded by the IPCC, and it will warm the planet is a joke. If you look at only rural temperature monitoring sites, we have been cooler in the last 50 years by 0.6 deg C on average than in the first 50 years of the 20th century.
"Global warming" is based on false data and false assumptions. The greenhouse hypothesis was only a suggestion back in the early 1800's, mentioned by Arrhenius in the 1860's, and has never been established or confirmed because it failed being thermodynamically invalid. IR absorption and emission by a cold gas does not constitute warming. Water vapor has the greatest effect technically, but still very small and, instead, is part of a global heat engine which carries heat upwards to be lost to space.
Polar bears numbered 8,000 back in the 1950's and are about 25,000 now. How could they possibly be in danger? They survived the Medieval Warm Period and the Holocene Optimum just fine, and all of the other warmer interglacial periods. Where's the problem?
Of the 13 colonies of polar bears, 11 are stable or growing. The other two, where it has been cooling the most by the way, are declining as they have reached the carrying limit of their ecosystem; they are driving away their prey - a typical boom and bust pattern for predator-prey relationships. These are the bears with the most ice, not the least.
The planet is not warming. It plunged 1.3 degrees after 1950 (1.8 deg C from the peak in 1938 to the minimum in 1968), and has been up and down in the mid-range ever since. We are currently cooling rather rapidly from a small peak in 1998 (which was almost back to the 1953 pre-plunge temperature), as solar cycle 24 has been very late in starting. The next 25-30 years may be very similar to the very cool Dalton Minimum or worse.
The science of global warming is as well-based in fact and science as creationism. Please do not support this trash science. The catastrophic claims are just too numerous and all encompassing to be true, and they not. They claim everything as they claim lying to the public is justified to get the attention this global threat requires. As a political agenda to develop power over other countries and to dictate world policy, this constitutes a power grab. And the invention of an entirely new and mandatory carbon trade economy is going to be a goldmine for those who have founded carbon credit trading companies such as Al Gore. His net worth grew from just under a million to over 150 million in the 5 years his company has been functioning.
Sequestering CO2 not only will not prevent global warming - it cannot as there is nothing to prevent - but it is plant food and whether we warm or not we will need the increased food productivity that this airborne fertilizer will give us.
There are no species in threat of extinction from global warming, once again, because we are not warming. All dangers are from human activities or natural, other, causes.
I am a biochemist/marine biologist/generalist and have been studying the CO2-global warming issue for several years by going to the real scientific literature. Nothing supports their claims except for the fact that carbon sequestration will be costly and cap-and-trade is going to make a lot of money for a very few people while achieving nothing but putting economic stress on all who need to use electricity.
Sincerely,
Sabin Colton, PhD
Posted on December 2, 2008 at 7:59 pm PST
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