Teachers and students: what are your thoughts on the PLTW engineering classes? I’m a student and have taken 2 classes so far, and both of them have been like eating glass. They aren’t taught by engineers, and the curriculum covers vast amounts of material but doesn’t teach anything in depth. I may be biased because I don’t want to be an engineer, so what are your thoughts? Are these classes any good? Is my school an outlier in how poorly the classes are taught?
as a pltw alum (IED, Aero, and Civil) and now an EE student in college, I think it seves its purpose well: a moderate depth intro to the engineering field/mindset, and some major fields within it. The purpose isn’t imo to teach everything, or even most things, but to engage students w/ STEM in a more hands on way, and give them time to experiment and work with professional-ish tools to learn the absolute basics. It is largely the stuff you might cover in the first quarter or semester of classes actually in each field, but abstracting away a lot of the math and physics that explains it all.
Someone once described it as ‘an inch deep and a mile wide’ and that seems pretty apt.
I’m glad I took them as a student. I learned a lot despite being bored rather often. The hands on stuff was a good intro to stem before I started robotics. I do wish I had done more research into the college credit, though.
I believe it largely depends on the educator. I’ve seen it taught in very good ways and very poor ways.
I have mixed feelings about the engineering courses. I’m in a kind of unique position in that I am taking Engineering Design and Development (a senior capstone type class) but have not taken any others before. Normally you need to take them in some kind of sequential order as prerequisites for later classes. I talked to the teacher before school started and based on my previous work on FRC and a sophomore independent study I did, she let me take whatever course I wanted. Also, the way the school’s schedule worked out, my class was stacked with an IED class in the same period, so our teacher spends most of her time with that class (~12 freshman and 5 sophomores) while my other classmate in EDD and I somewhat independently work on our stuff.
Ok for my actual opinion on the class, overall, I don’t like it. First, EDD feels more like a business class than an engineering class. We spend more of our time writing papers justifying our project, thinking about planning how we will test our system, and acting like we were in a multimillion-dollar company trying to get funding. Yes, I know they are good skills and most engineers should have them, but it’s taken so much away from the actual engineering. Second, the course is poorly written. iirc, it was written by a college, and it really feels like it was written for a college, not high schoolers. On top of that, I have had my head FRC coach (retired Boeing, CE, EE, and lawyer) review some of my work with the class prompts and he says that the course is just poorly written. I may have had a better experience if the teacher could spend more time with us, but the class still seems pretty not great.
Since my class is double slotted with IED, I also get to watch that class from my spot in the corner of the room. The teacher never had the respect of the students and the students have never paid attention, so that class, in particular, seems rough. It looks like they do cover a lot of good stuff, but (and this is true for my class too) PLTW tries to throw sooooo much information at you and a lot of it isn’t coherent and resources don’t make life easier. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good info in the courses, but it’s so buried and jumbled that it would take a very good teacher to give the class well. Personally, I’m glad I learned CAD, 3D printing, and design + build outside of those classes. With our education system, I doubt I would have learned much of the stuff I enjoy doing today. And forget anyone who isn’t actually interested in learning this.
That sounds similar to my experiences thus far- the classes are chaotic, the material is difficult to follow, and the teachers are subpar.
One time in college, my roommate found a band-aid in the Rally’s burger he was eating. I haven’t eaten at a Rally’s since. That was over twenty years ago.
Oddly, Rally’s seems to still be in business. I see them everywhere. They must be turning a profit, people must be enjoying their products. Perhaps my experience was an isolated incident, and I’m missing out on something good by solely relying on my negative memory.
I have been teaching PLTW classes since 2005. I’ve worked with hundreds of other PLTW education professionals, I’ve seen dozens of workshops and classroom setups and projects and examples of following the curriculum as written, as well as stretching to fit the needs and resources of the clientele and community.
I can tell you without hesitation that the way I taught fifteen years ago is completely different than the way I teach it now.
My memory of PLTW classes (like 10 years ago, at least) was that they were based around what even then felt like a pretty archaic idea of how engineering worked – tons of emphasis on hand drafting through rote repetition, and framing it as something that you had to absolutely master as a prerequisite in order to “work up to” CAD (which was then mostly non-parametric AutoCAD), for example.
I have vivid memories of my engineering teacher in high school derisively referring to 3d/parametric CAD programs like Inventor and Solidworks as “kiddie CAD,” and that it would be useless to us compared to REAL drafting/CAD skills taught in PLTW
Clearly (from the variety of experiences described in this thread) there is no one unified PLTW engineering experience. I have taught PLTW since 2005 and am officially certified in six courses, though some I haven’t taught in a while. I think PLTW in general isn’t what it once was, and that there is plenty of new information and alternatives available, where once it was really the only game in town. The college credit thing was never really worth what they claimed and I have dropped it as something I tell my students about. I have extensively reworked nearly every project that comes through their curricula and now have a deep roster of projects that are only genetically related to anything PLTW.
That said, I would not automatically discount the organization or any school that uses it. The quality of instruction comes down to the quality of the instructor. Joe_G’s experience sounds like the teacher was misrepresenting the curriculum to the students in order to teach what they were comfortable with themselves; I started teaching the CAD classes 16 years ago and there was never an emphasis on hand drafting and archaic work in the written curriculum.
I don’t have any first-hand experience with PLTW, but I’ll share my second-hand experience.
Our school used to have PLTW engineering class(es?), back when we had a qualified (B.S. in engineering) teacher to teach them. When I joined up with the team, most of the juniors had taken PLTW as freshmen. They remembered it very fondly; while it didn’t cover most topics in much depth it was definitely fun and got them excited about engineering, and the teacher then convinced them to join the FRC team. Sort of an “if you like this class, you’ll LOVE the FRC team!” thing. I got the feeling that the PLTW class was very very beginner level; it made sense to progress from the class to the team, but probably would have been fairly boring to go the other way around.
It’s probably changed a lot since I was in high school but our PLTW classes were mostly worksheets with step by step instructions on how to do each project. This was alright but it just felt like busy work. You didn’t really need to think about how to solve the problem.
Obviously teachers make learning engaging/worthwhile. Ours seems to be figuring out the work at about the same time as we were. Your mileage may vary. I think at our school, PLTW was something that could give you the taste of STEM so you could pursue it on your own (or in higher education).
I think this criticism is what it is regardless of curriculum. Leaving industry to go into secondary education can be over a $100k a year pay-cut (wages and benefits) for an experienced engineer so unless they’re retiring or have a passion to teach it’s a big career change with huge financial implications.
With that said, PLTW has its place in terms of bringing in standards to the classroom. The school I mentor at had tried to do their own internal Engineering program but it was a joke and pretty much just robotics team fundraising time and a study hall. PLTW has brought in structure and frankly the CIM curriculum seems to be pretty good from my interaction with what the kids are learning and how they’re applying it to build season (I understand the course is taught a little out of order to move up material like speeds, feeds, G Code, etc… to get taught before build season). I don’t know that it’s the best curriculum out there but given the teaching staff turn over we’ve seen it does help keep consistency for the kids year to year that the robotics mentors are able to build upon for the kids who choose to participate in FRC.
I don’t know if this will help…but…here’s a view from an engineering mentor, not a teacher, who’s been on an FRC team for a while.
Not long after our team started, the school started a PLTW Engineering class. At the time, we were not meeting at the school. A few students who came to the team were in the class, and did some Inventor design. Over the next several years, more students who were in the Engineering class showed up on the tam. We moved the robot build to the school, and after a couple years (lots of club sponsor/coach/teacher turnover) the Engineering teacher took over as club sponsor/coach. At this time about half the team was in Engineering class. We had several students using Inventor to design much of the robot, including some 3D printed parts. Then several years ago, the teacher left, and we’ve lost all of our CAD knowledge.
I never picked up any CAD skills, being old and lazy.
I think the class did help students with some of the design work, but I still spent a lot of time teaching them about how to design and build robots. It was nice to ask them to do some work in Inventor, and then we could refine the design, and print drawings to build stuff from (we have no CAM capability aside from occasionally working 3d printers)
I expect that with a teacher who wants to work with students to built neat machines, PLTW can be a good thing. But I can also see that it could be a rough class, with the wrong teacher.
I’ve only taken one class, the out-of-sequence Digital Electronics course my senior year. This happened because I changed schools (and FRC teams) and there wasn’t a science class that I could both take (right preresiquites) and not be wasting time in (wasn’t something I already took); it took the principle’s override, but it was granted and “where I really needed to be”. Good thing that Indiana Core40 diplomas only require(d) three years of science.
It was a fun class… and was very good EET prep too (what I did in that class was about 75% of my two digital classes my freshman year of college). A lot of it was simulation or physical breadboarding of circuits… with a bit of soldering at the start. A class I always looked forward to.
I’m sure the curriculum has changed since the 2010/2011 school year… but hopefully it’s still a fun class.
Half of engineering education is learning a set of facts and tools specific to some field.
The other half is curating and utilizing a creative problem solving process, which may happen to draw from that set of facts.
Conversely, a lot of high school courses are skewed much more toward simply memorizing a set of facts.
I think a lot of the variance folks experience relative to PLTW and similar coursework depends on the instructor’s ability to teach the content, which has some fundamental differences from a biology class.
It’s really tough. I’d struggle to teach and motivate the material.
And, as others noted, look at their website for the numbers they measure for “impact”:
None of those involve “Learned new STEM Concepts”. It’s all about just getting more interested in STEM, and directing future investigation. I’d imagine a student going into the program to who already knows a lot of electronics, and wants to learn more about digital electronics design, would walk away somewhat disappointed.
I’ve taught PLTW classes for four years after spending thirty years in engineering management. I have a Chem Eng degree (from a few years ago). I think the coursework is excellent, as is the fact that teachers are required to take a two week very intensive class to be able to teach PLTW classes - that is excellent training and is better than other alternatives I know.
I wish Principles of Engineering had existed when I was in high school - it is a great survey class that really helps students decide what field of engineering is most interesting to them.
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