Educating a future engineer

[Travis Bendele]

I'm educating a future engineer.  He's a junior in high school (graduating May '26) and wants to earn an engineering degree.  His options for technical courses in high school are very limited.

My request for the community is a list of recommended topics, courses, and videos. 

I am including him in my project to create an arduino-controlled pellet smoker.  Through that, he'll be exposed to

• a tear-down of an off-the-shelf smoker,
• the concepts of design inputs, verification, and validation (I'm a medical device engineer, but I don't want to over-do this.)
• line coding in Python (he has no coding education, so I'll have to show him my work)
• small-signal versus power electronic components
• control systems at a very basic level
• how to not electrocute yourself when dealing with line power

I plan to encourage his parents to get him exposure to line code programming before he graduates.  I've got this video on his list of assignments:

https://youtu.be/zOjov-2OZ0E  ("Introduction to Programming and Computer Science."  Two hours)

I also had him watch a 2.5 hour introduction to Arduino, but he'll have to watch again because he wasn't ready for the depth.

In today's colleges, I really believe that a student needs to walk in already understanding these topics on day one, but it could also make a difference in getting accepted to a college to begin with.  If you had a bright individual with no formal education in engineering topics, what resources would you use to set him up for success?

[Travis Bendele]

By the way, I want to give a shout-out to SolidProfessor.  They partner with SolidWorks to provide great educational videos.  They offer much more, though including shorter series on Arduino, 3D printing, and GD&T. 

[Aaron Moncur]

@Travis Bendele I'd have him tear down several products and see how they work inside. I think this is one of the best ways for new engineers to develop that mental library of design solutions. Then he can choose one of the internal components, model it in CAD, 3D print it, and see if it fits. For extra credit, make some kind of design change, 3D print it, install it, and see if it works. 

Here is a teardown I just did to see how an EMO switch action works. I think practical activities like this are incredibly instructive. 

 

[Travis Bendele]

Thanks, Aaron.  I think a significant number of your Being an Engineer podcast guests would agree.  My first boss was an absolute genius.  (There are foundational things we know about the human heart because of his work.)  As the owner of the company he would regularly pull this young engineer into the lab for one of these tear-it-down-and-find-out sessions.  A fishing line remover can be used for fast insertion of wires into a catheter.  A tennis racket-shaped bug zapper generates a high voltage from common batteries.  He made important applications of those physics concepts you and I forgot after the semester exam (e.g., latent heat) but then he'd tear apart a gadget from the dollar store to learn how it worked.  And in doing so, he taught me a great deal about how to do the work of engineering.

[Aaron Moncur]

He sounds like a great mentor. I'd like to do more of these tear-down videos this year - hopefully they become a useful "mental library" of mechanisms engineers can pull from. 

[Brad Hirayama]

@Travis Bendele Encourage him to explore the reasoning behind his ambition to be an engineer. Then I'd focus on him asking questions, the greatest skill/competency an early engineer can possess is curiosity.  Asking the right questions can get someone far in their career.