Thayer's Celebrated ES-21 Offered in Summer Term
DARTMOUTH'S Thayer School of Engineering is redesigning design education. And this summer the program will be carried beyond the regular college year and be made a part of the Summer Term also.
Sophomores enrolled in the course ES-21 have been experiencing engineering practice at first hand by developing aids for the blind, crippled and mute. The actual working devices they have engineered and built have attracted the attention of rehabilitation experts. This is the course that will be open to qualified students enroled in the summer session.
An unusual faculty has been "recruited" for the summer offering of ES-21. Six professors of engineering from six other colleges will teach ES-21, under the Thayer faculty's guidance, and participate in a Design Education Work- shop. The Workshop is being conducted with a grant from the National Science Foundation which also allows each professor to bring to Dartmouth four of his own students to take ES-21. Workshop participants and their students hope to return home and improve or establish undergraduate engineering design courses with the aid of their experiences this summer in Hanover.
Dartmouth's "ES-21: Introduction to Engineering" has received national attention because of its relatively unique emphasis on introducing students to engineering by requiring them to perform an engineer's job. They must, within a time limit, conceive, design and produce a prototype which satisfies a human need, and is economically feasible. Last fall the sophomore students at Thayer designed devices to aid crippled, blind and mute children; the previous year the student companies that make up the class were asked to devise a home water-purifying system.
According to Dean Myron Tribus of the Thayer School, the course has been well received, but "we are sure it can be an even better educational experience."
The visiting professors and students will bring new ideas on how to improve the course. And, in turn, they will take back to their own institutions a working knowledge of how Thayer School has conducted this successful undergraduate offering.
The Design Education Workshop will be staffed by regular Thayer School faculty members under the direction of Prof. Robert C. Dean Jr., assisted by Profs. Paul T. Shannon and S. Russell Stearns '37.
The six visiting professors will be Thornton W. Price of Arizona State University; William S. Chalk, University of Washington; Marshall Min-Sin Lih, Catholic University; William Shewan, Valparaiso University; Frederick G. Sheppard, Duke University; and Douglas W. Bradbury, Clemson University.
The summer course is open to all students who have studied freshman sciences and mathematics and who meet the requirements of the Dartmouth summer term. It will be an eight-week double course and will carry the equivalent of six semester hours of undergraduate credit.
