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As part of the course of History and Philosophy of Engineering Education here at Purdue we developed this video in an attempt
to answer the question: what is engineering education?
Given the assignment of defining engineering education, we decided to represent this task using elements of the engineering design process; in other words; show Engineering
Education as design process. The message was to communicate the definition of engineering through the design process.
For doing so, we found appropriate to use the six main components of Activity Theory as a framework for a cohesive way to
present and describe how these six components were represented in an engineering education arena.
Our concepts were a great fit to the indices and components of the triangle. There was an overlap with the components of the triangle and the concepts of our message. This video was designed with the general public as the primary target audience. We wanted to make sure that our message could be understood by: a) students considering engineering or engineering education, b) individuals who are in the area of engineering education and who wanted to use it for educational purposes, c) peers and instructors of the engineering education program at Purdue. Our goal in creating this video was to raise the level of awareness of current thinking of engineering education through two types of messages—i.e. implicit and explicit messages. The implicit message was represented by us and the process of creating this video. Our message was to show that implementing the engineering design process is a social process exemplified by modeling, teamwork and some components of the design process. These components include: analyzing the problem, conducting research, brainstorming, creating the prototype, developing the product, and communicating. The explicit message was conveyed through the model we constructed with the post-it notes. Elements of that model include: tools that engineers use, the subjects (individuals) taking part in the process of doing engineering, the goal or outcome of engineering design, the rules as design constraints, the social part involved in the community, and the collaborative part represented by the division of labor. |