Hello Twitter enthusiasts and Big Beacon community members, Come join me, Erica Lee Garcia, for this week’s twitter chat about student-powered movements, collaboration and community-building. We get started Wednesday September 24th at 8 pm ET, on #BigBeacon. Recycling: A tale of student-powered change When municipal leaders and engineers in Ontario, Canada developed the technology and infrastructure to make…
At this time of year, thousands of post-secondary students around the world are enjoying the fruits of their many many hours of hard work and attending their graduation ceremonies. It's a fun time, a celebratory time, and a time for families to show their pride in their graduate's accomplishments. It's a time for students to emerge from the fog of…
I've spent the last several years of my engineering career thinking very carefully about what engineers can and can't do. So far my conclusions are that engineers can have tremendous impact in areas that you might not expect - ending poverty, fighting injustice, creating jobs, saving lives. The engineering profession's scope is well beyond the boundaries of the purely technical.…
Design thinking, a methodology for human-centered problem solving, empowers its users to collaborate across disciplines and tackle the world’s biggest challenges. Students are asked to solve problems, but they must also learn to define the problems themselves by working closely with the people for whom they are designing. This focus on the human side of design is vital to create…
Guest author and co-host: Laurie Moore, Communications Lead for National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter) at Stanford University epicenter.stanford.edu Change in engineering education comes in many different forms and from many different sources. At Epicenter, we work to help engineering undergraduates combine their technical skills with an entrepreneurial mindset, and we’ve found that students are some of…
Welcome to the Big Beacon twitter chat, where we explore ideas and community relevant to the transformation of engineering education every week. Look for hashtag #BigBeacon every Wednesday at 8 pm EST. This week Wednesday September 25th will be a discussion around Engineering Orientation, sometimes called Frosh Week, Freshers Week, or Welcome Week. For many engineering students, it's a…
Welcome back to the Big Beacon twitter chat, where we explore ideas and community relevant to the transformation of engineering education every week. Look for hashtag #BigBeacon every Wednesday at 8 pm EST. We have an exciting lineup of guest moderators and topics for the fall semester, starting off with our discussion with Sal Alajek, B.Eng., Portfolio Manager at Engineers…
Please join us at 8 pm EST on Wednesday May 29th on twitter, hashtag #BigBeacon for our weekly twitter chat. This week's topic is Rigor in Engineering Education. "Look to the left, look to the right. One of you will not be here at the end of this year." Thus began the engineering education experience of many of today's practicing…
Since joining up with The Big Beacon to discuss how A Whole New Engineering Education can produce A Whole New Engineer in the future, I have been thinking a lot about my own engineering education experience. Studying engineering is not just about academic rigour - though there is plenty of that! It's also about an identity; being a member of…
The earliest engineers were renaissance thinkers and visionaries. In the tradition of Leonardo daVinci, many were gifted artists as well as technical experts. Creativity as it appears (or doesn't) in engineering education and professional practice today is up for discussion on the Big Beacon Twitter chat tonight! Join us for the #BigBeacon Twitter Chat 2/27/2013 8PM EST. We'll explore these…