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Showing posts from May, 2012

Capstone classes and "real" engineering

I'll attempt a bit of subterfuge and obfuscation here so I don't inadvertently ruffle too many feathers... A friend just sent me a summary of the EE capstone projects from this year's crop of students at a university that shall go unnamed. Bright-eyed young engineers, fun problems, innovative solutions, yadda-yadda-yadda. Pretty much anyone reading this has a pretty good mental image of what might have been in the e-mail, and many of you LIVED it. But then, right at the end, was an incredibly troubling BTW: PS: professor's name here told me that he does not allow Arduinos to be used on these projects, since it makes things too easy (at this level of education, they're supposed to be learning the stuff that Arduino hides from you). Better he was there than me. I'd have lost my shit if an engineering prof said something like that to me. I get what he's saying- that the journey is the point, not the destination- it's just that for everything else...