Learnin' by doin'

"...they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end..." -Thoreau

This quote comes from Walden (which I'm currently reading), in a section where HD advocates students building their own [simple] school by hand rather than relying on expensive contractors, builders, etc. which only drives up the cost of education for future generations. More broadly, he's advocating for learning by doing. Another example is a student digging and smelting his own ore to make a jack-knife (and reading however much is required to accomplish this) rather than spending that same month attending lectures on metallurgy and getting a store-bought knife from Papa. He poses the question of which student has learned more by the end of that 1 month period.

This reminded me of the general structure of most engineering curriculums I've come across. Students spend a lot of time in the first 2-3 years learning book concepts, equations, and drawing simplified systems and solving them. It isn't until the final year or so that hands-on lab courses or group projects for engineering come into play. I think the argument is generally: You have to learn the basics to understand those hands-on projects. But I would argue that the high attrition rates in engineering come from the "dry" mode we adhere to in teaching concepts. For people who learn experientially (which is the majority of people), those connections would be make that much more concrete if they saw the actual physical representations of what those models and equations apply to.

I'd love to have the opportunity to introduce more hands-on learning into the courses I'll be teaching. Something to ponder for now...