The Curriculum
The Curriculum: “introduce, study, build and test”
The Cadet Engineering program consisted of a 6-week residence at OU in the summer, with monthly follow-ups during the following academic year.
The summer school and monthly follow-ups were repeated every year until the participating students’ high school graduation.
During the summer of 1970 the 25 students were divided in two sections, headed by OU professors Glenn Jackson and Gilbert Wedekind. They were assisted by undergraduate assistants and a high school teacher.
Pedagogy
Jackson and Wedekind relied on two pedagogical principles:
- motivation (so that the program would act as a catalyst for motivating students to make better use of their high school opportunities)
- a close student/teacher relationship.
The 2 instructors wanted to introduce engineering through “laboratory and/or real world examples.” Thus, they hoped to generate in their students a desire to investigate the theory behind that concept or law.
In short, their pedagogy was based on “introduce, study, build and test.”
They also favored active involvement through students discussions.
The program alternated lecture, lab work, and homework.
Classes
Subjects included "graphical analysis, geometrics, mechanics, and technical skill development, and a review of basic algebra." Students also took a communications skills course, taught by Upward Bound staff at OU.
Instruction was conducted every day from Monday to Thursday for 5 hours. On Fridays, participants were taken on field trips. During evenings and weekends they could enjoy supervised recreational and sports activities. For example, they visited Cranbrook’s Science Museum and Planetarium.
Thus they constructed and launched model rockets while introducing the concepts of trajectories, thrust, velocity and acceleration.
After the experiment and data gathering, students discussed s whose rocket went the highest and other related questions. Later on, instructors introduced the same questions in different ways (in hopes that repetition would lead to reinforcement). The goal was to introduce the topic as naturally as possible and to give students a “need to know” sense.
The second year of the program, the same students returned. This time, the main objective was to introduce them to “engineering things” -- especially in electricity and fluid mechanics. The level was much higher than the year before and the students were pushed harder.
For 3 summers, through their high school years, the first cohort continued to attend the cadet engineering program. Between summers they also visited OU one Saturday a month to study maths and engineering related subjects. The same professors stayed with the students the entire time.
On the 4th year, when the students graduated from high school, they spent 8 weeks at OU taking up up to 8 credit hours of specially designed courses -- one of them a pre-engineering course taught by regular engineering faculty.
Every year after that, a new cohort was selected, with 15 students on average.
Source:
"Cadet Engineering: A Hope," OU News, March 15, 1971