[Dmentor]

I've thought a lot about our current educational process and wanted to share a few of my concepts for revolutionizing education (particularly collegiate engineering):

1. Direct Competition - As we have all experienced within FIRST, competition is an incredible motivator. Properly structured, competition can both make learning fun and motivate us to keep going farther than we might ever have thought possible. MIT's 2.007 competition is a perfect example. With regards to courses like statics, I could see integrating CAD products within physics simulation engines to create games requiring statics principles to excel.

2. Use Technology - Just imagine if every university recorded video of all the statics lectures covered this year and made them available to all the students. This would enable students to get multiple perspectives that best align with an individual student's learning style. The students could then rate lectures and submit questions for topics not covered (or not covered well). Within a short period of time we would have a comprehensive library of lectures comprehensively covering the material and from a multitude of perspectives. A useful byproduct of this approach would be to give the professor's more time to dedicate to game design (note that I'm not proposing this to eliminate the role of teaching but rather to recast the role of teacher).

3. Reduce Abstraction - Teaching fundamental equations and relationships is good but in my opinion equations need to be tied to a physical understanding of the world. Real-world problems would be used to teach how principles are applied and the limitations in doing so. Collaboration with industry would be a great way to bridge the issue with domain expertise.