Dean's message: Food for thought

Food is on everyone’s mind this time of year, including about 950 schoolchildren at Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley. And they’re not just eating the food. They’re growing it, harvesting it, cooking it, and studying it.

These sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders are participants in the Edible Schoolyard (www.edibleschoolyard.org), a project founded by local restaurateur Alice Waters (B.A.’67 Humanities). The idea is to expose children to food production, ecology, and nutrition, and instill in their young minds and bodies an appreciation for meaningful work and nutritious food. As Alice says so well, “If they grow it, they will eat it!” These young people are literally eating their program up.

When I think of these young students, I can’t help but feel optimistic. I’m sure this important brush with “learning-by-doing” will help them pursue whatever career they choose with enthusiasm and commitment, and I wonder how we can inspire minds like theirs to connect with science and engineering the way they have connected with the Edible Schoolyard. What can we do to inspire our most fertile minds—the ones with the potential to confront the 9/11s and the Hurricane Katrinas of tomorrow—to pursue science and engineering as a course of study and a consequent constructive application of their learning in our society as a way of life?

This summer our TEAMS Academy, the Teaching Engineering Applying Math Science program, put middle schoolers to work designing and building solar-powered robotic vehicles to boost their math and science skills. The six-week National Science Foundation (NSF)–sponsored enrichment program targets underserved minority students, hoping to steer them toward a career in engineering. Whether that long-term goal will be met remains to be seen, but, like those students working in the Edible Schoolyard, these young people simply can’t resist the “hands-on, minds-on” approach of learning-by-doing.

Curricular experiments by the NSF show that engineering undergraduates do best when they are introduced early to working in teams and to tackling real-world problems that reinforce the personal and social relevance of science and engineering. We see this every day in our students working on projects in CITRIS, our Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. These young people are not only focused on finding a good job or earning money; they really want to make a difference in people’s lives.

We must continue to look for compelling ways to catch the attention of our most talented potential engineers and scientists. I believe one secret is connection: connecting the next generation to something meaningful they can care about, whether it’s as simple as a red ripe tomato or as lofty as alleviating poverty for their own community or for the entire globe. From this first spark of connection grows the engineer’s fascination with our complex world—one full of challenges and opportunities—and the confidence needed to roll up one’s sleeves and get to work.

I welcome your thoughts at dean.forefront@coe.berkeley.edu.

A. Richard Newton
Dean, College of Engineering
Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering

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