MODERNIZING THE ENGINEERING CURRICULUM: A COMMUNITY COLLEGE APPROACH TO INTEGRATE MATERIALS

Providing a broad engineering education has become an enormous challenge. Engineering is derived from the basic sciences of physics and chemistry using tools provided by mathematics. With a broad high level introduction an engineer can move to any specialization. We believe that a solution to improving engineering education is to coordinate core engineering courses, calculus, differential equations, physics, chemistry, introductory engineering, materials science, and computer programming so that they support each other. Prince George's Community College has taken a first step in building such a curriculum by creating a new, one semester General Chemistry course specifically designed for engineers. Our collaborators at Howard University have helped in providing an open, online accompanying textbook through the LibreTexts project. Introductory courses are typically taught in isolation of one another without the interconnecting threads that bind topics in different courses together. Community colleges can be less influenced by departmental limits than universities. This freedom allows for greater opportunity for innovation.