Putting the Fun Back(?) in FEA

In a recent Business Week article, Greg Blonder, a technologist and partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, describes a paradox in science education that may be responsible for the declining ranks of scientists & engineers in this country.  He points out that most children are born inquisitive and want to solve problems, invent new things and new worlds, and generally tinker.  I saw a clear indication of this at Camp Invention where my son attended this past summer.  Greg points out that our current educational program actually demotivates the enthusiastic future engineer by forcing terminology, theory, and rote memorization on them at a young age. This isn't fun... which, like it or not, is still the #1 motivator for kids thru most of high school, (& some...retirement.)  When it ceases to be fun, it ceases to be important. Yes, most students will slug thru it to get the grades they feel compelled to get but not because they are excited by it.  Blonder states:

"Change starts with the recognition that, while all of us need to be scientifically literate both for our own welfare and the nation's technological progress, we can't all be scientists. That requires teaching scientific literacy generally, while reserving the tools of the trade for those pursuing scientific careers — the exact opposite of the approach academics now take."

I see this with my kids and actually with my wife, who is going back to school to get her teaching degree for grades K-2 after more than 15 years as a pre-school day care teacher, owner & entrepreneur. I also see it with practicing designers and design engineers when it comes to FEA.  For the foreseeable future, there will be a need for full-time analysts to handle high end nonlinear & dynamic problems.  They'll need to know the terminology and theory of FEA to be successful. However, designers looking for quick answers to design decisions don't. As I've said previously, the more you know, the better you'll be. However, you should learn the detailed workings of FEA because you are intrigued and go looking for the info...not because you were force fed it before you've even bought off on the need for analysis.  A design engineer that worked for me once enrolled in a master's degree program & chose to specialize in FEA since he felt this would be an important aspect of his career. After a semester of theory, he gave it up as worthless and to my knowledge, never did anything with FEA again!

In a presentation at a local SolidWorks User Group, I tried to make this point by showing how quickly COSMOSWorks could resolve traditional and common engineering design decisions for sizing, shafting and fastener selection - not the things typically reserved for specialized FEA.  Tools like COSMOSWorks can make many tedious parts of any design project faster and more fun while providing insight to behaviors you might not have noticed before.  If you've been thinking about it as difficult, specialized, irrelevant, or complicated for whatever reason, I encourage you to fire up your license and explore how many design decisions can be simplified directly using your 3D geometry.  I used to call FEA "engineering Nintendo" (Does that date me?)  If you find yourself caught up in a discussion of nodes & elements before buying into the technology, even at one of our seminars, remember, there is NO QUIZ at the end so focus on the fun part and give it a try. 

-- Vince

Comments

[Greg]

I agree with your forecast - experts with specific training will be neded for dynamics and nonlinear analysis for a long time... But there's no reason why these guys can't have fun too. Sure, they may seem like they enjoy poring over pages and pages of ascii dat files looking to diagnose a convergence problem, but application of modern graphics techniques in the more modern preprocessors are dragging these same guys out of the slide rule generation and into the PS3 generation (to continue your console analogy)

[Fahad Bashir]

I have to agree with Gregg. I am an undergraduate mechanical engineering student and what Gregg pointed out is what bothers me most about our educational system.
I recently modeled a complete vehicle in Solid Works and analyzed it with COSMOS but when I started I literally knew nothing about this stuff. Because it was my domain and I could do what I felt like I learned faster than throughout my course.

[Graphic Design]

Great post,