Engineering Education at NC State

Preparing to educate engineers to meet society’s needs in the next 50 years

College professors are a group who are doing a job for which they have often had little to no training: teaching! There have still been outstanding college teachers over history, but the range has been wide. In addition to this, the fields of engineering and computer science have moved and changed at a rate that made ensuring our engineering students are prepared for the jobs they will be doing in ten years is increasingly difficult–particularly when the technology they will be using doesn’t exist yet.

Add to all of this the ways in which engineering and computer science influencing society on a daily basis (think AI, cell phones, electric cars, high speed rail, space exploration, GPS, and many more). Educating engineers is definitely not the same now that it was even 20 years ago. Engineering education fills the gap between simply doing education the way it has always been done and educating the workforce of this century.

Doing post secondary education differently means equipping community college instructors to teach courses that will both transfer to a university AND prepare engineering students for when they get there. An engineering education masters degree will prepare those instructors.

Being an engineering or computer science professor will require an increasing dedication and attention to excellence in teaching and student mentoring. An engineering education graduate certificate will prepare those professors.

Working at a museum to educate the public about the changing and exciting advancements in engineering and computer science becomes increasingly difficult as technology advances. Either an engineering education masters or certificate can help with that.

Doing technical sales requires the ability to understand the audience and relate complex technical subjects to the public. How about an engineering education undergraduate minor?

The Engineering Education Program at NC State is an equal collaboration between the Colleges of Engineering and Education.

Our faculty:

Dr. Laura Bottomley is the College of Engineering Director for the Engineering Education Program at North Carolina State University. She is also an Associate Teaching Professor in the Colleges of Engineering and Education.  In her 30 years of teaching experience, she has taught every grade K through graduate school and has personally reached close to 200,000 students. She has received awards from the White House twice with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics, Science and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) program, once individually and once as a part of the Women and Minority Engineering Programs at NC State. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the IEEE Education Society. Dr. Bottomley is a Fellow of ASEE and a Fellow of IEEE.

Dr. Kanton Reynolds has twenty years of industry experience working for companies including General Motors, IBM, and Lenovo in a variety of capacities spanning quality engineering, system assurance, program development, and project management. He is originally from Columbia, South Carolina, and earned his bachelor’s degree at NC State, his MBA at UNC-Chapel Hill, and his master’s and Ph.D. at North Carolina A&T University. As a graduate student, Reynolds worked in the political and economic sections of the U.S. Embassy in Malawi, researched Malawian and Sudanese political issues and human rights, monitored compliance with United Nations treaties, and served as an international election observer in Guyana as a part of The Carter Center formed by President Jimmy Carter and based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Veronica Cateté (kə – te – tā) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NC State University. Dr. Cateté has been a Microsoft Research Scholar and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She received back-to-back Best Paper awards at the international conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (2016, 2017) for her dissertation work and has also earned Best Paper awards at the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (2022) and Foundations of Digital Games Conference (2014). Her specialty is in K-16 Computer Science Education and her research lies at the intersection of Computer Science frontiers and the Learning Sciences.  Dr. Cateté’s research primarily focuses on enabling broader participation in computing by teachers, students, and other community stakeholders.

Several things make the Engineering Education program at NC State unique.

1-We sit across two Colleges with access to all of the research and experience of both.

2-As a program, we act as a convenor and facilitator for cross-departmental and cross-College work at NC State. Whether this means funded research, unfunded research, assisting departments to handle increased teaching loads as the College of Engineering grows over the next five years, or helping departments respond agilely to challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, the Engineering Education faculty and graduate students are uniquely positioned to bring cutting edge research and practice techniques to bear.

3-Our program is steeped in consideration for educating the engineers of the future in everything that we do. Every course that we offer includes material from the best thinking available on educating whole engineers to work in an inclusive and global workplace with a deeply inclusive mindset. And our program is preparing the educators that will bring this dream to fruition. Think and Do.

4-Our Engineering Education program prepares educators to teach undergraduate engineering classes (at community college or university), conduct industry training, work with museums to present engineering exhibits, do engineering outreach, communicate technical subjects (as in engineering sales), and other, related, activities. That is why there is a prerequisite for admission of an engineering (or related subject) degree! For those interested in teaching K-12 with a focus on STEM, check out our College of Education programs, which offer teaching certifications for K-12.

Changing the paradigm of engineering education

The origins of Engineering Education at NC State began in the early 1980’s with the work for Dr. Rich Felder, Rich Felder Legacy Website. Since that time, NC State College of Engineering has had deep engagement in engineering education from the work of The Engineering Place in the precollege space to the work of our many innovative departmental faculty.

Making engineering holistic, not just “math and science” but solving wicked problems in a multidisciplinary world

Do you have questions about engineering education at NC State? Contact us at engineering_education_ncsu@ncsu.edu