Q: Why is it important to teach engineering to high school students?
A: “Engineering is really fundamentally about problem-solving,” says Julia Hodges, a math and engineering teacher at Hawken School. “When you’re teaching kids engineering, what you’re actually teaching them to do is to follow a design process and develop methods to validate their solutions. They can’t just look up the answer in the back of the book to see if they got it right. People that major in engineering often go into different [fields]. They have this valuable skill set of being able to look at a problem that nobody knows how to solve and identify, ‘OK, what are the things I want to get out of this? What are the constraints I have to work within? What’s available to me? How might I start to figure out how to do this?’ ”
