Engineering program gives prospective students alternative to AP classes

Because of the difficulty and rigor of the school’s current science and mathematics courses, the school has been working on developing its three-year-old engineering program and making other STEM classes more accessible to students.

Currently, the school offers two engineering classes: Introduction to Engineering Design, taught by Audrey Warmuth, and Principles of Engineering, co-taught by Warmuth and Matt Welander. A new third-year class, Digital Electronics, will be added to the curriculum next year.

According to Warmuth, the school decided to start the program after people noticed that there were no introductory-level computer science classes offered. The discussion then expanded to highlight the need for introductory-level classes in all engineering disciplines, not just computer science.

The goal of the program, Warmuth said, is to encourage students already sure of their passion for engineering and advertise the subject to students “on the fence” about it. The program also supports a third type of intelligence — 3D visualization, a skill essential to engineering that students are “never given any avenue to grow or to practice.”

For instance, Warmuth said that because of the commitment required to participate in the school’s robotics team, some students may be hesitant to join. With engineering classes incorporated into the school’s curriculum, everybody can be exposed to the field.

“At a school like Saratoga, we have so many elite learners [that] so often students will feel like ‘I’m not in [AP] Calculus BC, [so] I can’t be an engineer,’” Warmuth said. “We want kids who don’t really see themselves as [engineers] to have an opportunity to see ‘I really am capable.’”

Warmuth added that the classes hope to promote the study of science, technology, math and engineering (STEM) subjects; if students only see STEM as really difficult math, physics and programming classes with no joy involved, their interest will inevitably wane.

“Part of it is just trying to bring the joy, discovery [and] excitement back into engineering [and] science,” Warmuth said, “because if you think about what happened in the science [and] math department, it’s so based upon the standards that teachers have no wiggle room to bring any of these into the classroom.”

The program will also help students who want to study engineering in college transition into those high-level courses. At the same time, Warmuth emphasized the classes are hands-on and low-stress, unlike many of the school’s STEM AP classes.

“We take kids [through] a series of exercises so they learn [basic material], and then after that it’s project-based, and they get to apply what they learned before,” Warmuth said. “There really aren’t any tests, and kids should be able to do most of what they need to do during class time.”

This interactive atmosphere defines the engineering program, Warmuth said. With the addition of a new 3D printer, students can now model a project and quickly print it so they can look at it. In Principles of Engineering, a more mechanical engineering-focused class, students learn about levers, gears and different types of energy, culminating in a solar power car project.

This semester, the students are learning the Robot C programming language, which will also lead to a final, open-ended project. The project, Warmuth said, will tie into the Digital Electronics class, which will look at binary logic, state machines and again, feature a project where students must work to complete a given challenge.

In the future, Warmuth said she hopes the program will be able to open two courses of all three of the classes, in addition to a fourth-year independent study class where students can define a problem they want to solve and spend the year engineering a solution to it.

For those who in the program, Warmuth said, their knowledge of Excel, 3D modeling software, basic programming abilities, and electronic data collection skills should help students more easily transition into a college engineering program.

“Engineering really is a difficult course of study, so is science, it’s no joke,” Warmuth said. “[But] when the going gets tough, I really hope that kids have a memory of being in a class and saying, ‘Gosh, doing robotics was really fun. And I know maybe the math class that I now have to do in college is tough, but I know if I just stick with this, I’m going to get to the robotics types of things.’”