(Odometer: 7,880 miles) NATICK, Mass.–Is the shift toward integrated curriculum and giving students hands-on build-your-own experiences a flash in the pan or is it crucial to building engineers? It's definitely the latter, according to Tom Gaudette, principal academic evangelist at Mathworks here. More design resources "People used to say–the guidance counselor in high school would say–'You're good at math; you should be

OLD WESTBURY, N.Y.–We frequently ask entrepreneurs "what's the caliber of engineering students you're getting these days?" The answer is invariably something like, "They're super smart but need a lot of training." This perhaps is an age-old refrain, but it takes on new resonance for an age in which companies increasingly run leaner and have less time to train and mentor new hires

AMHERST, Mass.–Call it reverse innovation. During our tour of UMass Amherst's incredible M5 maker space, Baird Soules talked to us about several projects on which first-, second- and third-year students collaborate to get their fingers dirty and their minds stimulated. The others included a robotic platform, built in collaboration with the theater department, and a robotic, WiFi-controlled wheelchair called Emma

AMHERST, Mass.–MARC 5.0 has its own Twitter feed. He/she/it is a robot project at the UMass Amherst's engineering department that's dedicated to the department's hip M5 maker space. It started life as a senior engineering project and has morphed into one of three maker projects running this semester at the school. UMass sophomore Matt Hunt told us about another of

AMHERST, Mass.–It’s often not difficult to get science and engineering students involved in some maker project, especially cars. When we hit the University of Pennsylvania in the early fall, the electric drag-racing team emphasized that their project was open to everyone. More design resources Here at the University of Massachusets, in the M5 hacker space, the group threw open the tent wider.

AMHERST, Mass.–A crucial component of encouraging the next generation of students in science and engineering is the maker/hacker culture that is blossoming across the country. More design resources We saw it in Detroit at Maker Faire; we saw it in the cornfields of Illinois; and we saw it in the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts, where professors and administrators have

PHILADELPHIA–College is so different these days. Can you imagine having the chance, back in the day, to build an electric dragster? That’s what engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) have done in the past six years. In an earlier segment, we talked to them about the origins of the design, which emerged from a long-popular solar car design

(Odometer 6,150 miles) PHILADELPHIA–When I think about the building of the pyramids or great European cathedral construction in the middle ages, I think of all the people who worked on those projects who never lived to see their completion. That thinking is a little strange, I’ll admit. A similar feeling swept over me as I stood with Bill Etter, electrical team leader;

PHOENIX–The future of engineering is coming from Venezuela and just loves cars. Meet Harold Schweitzer, a senior engineering student at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. We met Schweitzer during a recent stop here. His brother Albert, a public relations professional, introduced us, and I invited him to drive the Volt down to TV3 in Phoenix for our Good Morning