THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE: DEVELOPING A COURSE TO INTRODUCE ENGINEERING TO NON-ENGINEERS
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding engineering is an important factor in fully participating in civic decision-making, however there are few opportunities for those outside engineering to learn about it. We developed and offered a course on engineering for Arts (and Commerce) students, to increase technical literacy, which counted toward the Arts degree Science requirement. A teaching team from three disciplines presented four technical modules themed around specific technologies, and covering a wide range of engineering practice topics. Students participated in many hands-on activities and demonstrations, and instructors used flipped classroom techniques. Assessment for each module consisted of both a short technical online quiz and a blog post about a topic in the news, which allowed students to bring in their own disciplinary knowledge. The final assessment was a group video project where students aimed to advocate for a position on a technical/civic issue related to one of the modules. We detail in this paper the results of our consultations with Arts; the course structure and goals; some of the specific content and activities designed (with an emphasison correctly targeting pre-existing knowledge of the students); a reflection on the successes and challenges in the first offering, including student feedback; and suggestions for others who might want to develop such a course.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it