Rolf Hut: "This is why I came to Delft, students say"
Delft engineers are internationally renowned for their inventiveness and their can-do mentality. To get there, they have all had to get their feet wet during their degree programme. This is achieved during practical education, with most courses taking their own approach. So what is the common denominator? Education Fellow Rolf Hut goes in search of the typical 'Delft Approach to Maker Education (DAME)'.
“Delft graduates want to improve the world by means of their engineering skills. Very often this involves actual physical devices that do something. Graduates should therefore, wherever possible, make the thing itself as a capstone to their education.” Based on this philosophy, Rolf Hut has been teaching maker education for years, both within his own discipline – he is an Associate Professor Water Resources Management – and in applied physics. The more realistic, the better, is one of his principles here. “If you're going to design a new type of hull for oil tankers, make a real scale model that you can test in a test tank, instead of just a computer model”, he says.
Another principle is: the sooner, the better. “For example, get students to work with real climate models at the earliest opportunity, instead of using simplified models for teaching purposes.” Students also happen to really appreciate this. “Our physics students have usually made a conscious decision to come to Delft, rather than go to Leiden or Amsterdam, where the physics education is more theoretical. Here, we let them build their own sensors in the first year. They may be improvised sensors, but they do work. That way, students realise that they themselves can build something that works in the real world. ‘This is why I came to Delft’, they often say, which makes me think I'm doing a good job.”
Foto: Sam Rentmeester
Allowing students their own interpretation
Another of his maker education principles is that Hut gives students the freedom to bring their own interpretation to assignments, within the learning objectives. “For example, one such learning objective is to understand how a water phenomenon is translated via a sensor into an electrical signal and then into digital data. To learn that, they build their own water sensor, but they are free to choose the exact type of sensor. In this way, they can give expression to their personal motivation within the field,” he says. “I have had international students who wanted to make soil moisture meters for automatic irrigation. And a student who was a member of the rowing club chose a sensor that measures the distance between rowing boat and quay. Both of these are great for achieving the learning goal, but also help with intrinsic motivation.”
You can take a look at the choices you have made in your teaching and which of these you can leave to the student.
―
Rolf Hut
It is an approach that can be used much more widely, according to Hut. “You can take a look at the choices you have made in your teaching and which of these you can leave to the student. Take climate modelling research, for example. You can set practice assignments for a specific area, but you can also let students choose an area, substantiate their choice and calculate the influence of climate change for their chosen area. You then still meet the objective of teaching them how to work with the model.”
In much of Hut's hands-on teaching, the assessment revolves around whether something works or not. “We emphasise upfront that that's where the bar is set. It prevents students from coming ill-prepared in the hope of passing by sheer luck. Pass rates are very high as a result.” He realises that this approach is sometimes at odds with an educational programme that emphasises excellence. “I’m happy for students to achieve their learning goals; I’m also happy for them to achieve excellence, but that is mainly down to their own drive. I am not in favour of having to assess that. We test them on the learning objectives: whether the sensor works, or whether they have learned to work with the model, not whether they can write a great report about it. I don't want to be the one training engineers who can justify collapsing bridges with a fancy report.”
Although such a binary way of testing is very efficient, it certainly doesn’t make for the easiest way of teaching, Hut feels: “The difficulty is that you have to design a subject in such a way that you cover all your learning targets and that you assess them in your testing.” Sometimes this even involves writing a report. “E.g. if the design cycle is one of the learning objectives of a course, you cannot judge from the end result whether that cycle has been completed. In that case, students have to hand in a report. So it's not all black and white.”
Cycle
Knowledge transfer – controlled practice – application. Those are the three steps Hut bases all his teaching on. “On any given day, I will start a bit of classical knowledge transfer with a short lecture, where you link to things they should already know. Then we go into the lab for a controlled practice session, where everyone performs the same task, for example making and measuring a capacitor. Next, they develop their own sensor based on that capacitor. This cycle is repeated over and over again,” says Hut. “My course is also the culmination of a first year filled with a number of theoretical courses. They apply the knowledge they have gained there in my course, where they can choose their own subject for the final assignment. So this cycle is part of the individual subjects as well as the entire curriculum. I constantly keep this cycle in mind when designing my education.”
Common denominator
This is how Hut approaches his maker education, but how do others do this? During his Education Fellowship, Hut will be looking for the common thread of TU Delft's maker education. “In the past, we have all been inventing the wheel in isolation. I want to distil the common denominator from our institutional memory,” he says. “My own hypotheses are based on general knowledge of how education works and on experiences from my teaching, but do they hold up in the light of the experiences of colleagues?” Ultimately, he wants to arrive at a Delft Approach to Maker Education (DAME). “With such a framework, we can not only help new TU Delft lecturers, but also lecturers at our fellow universities or in the vocational and higher education sectors.” His Fellowship, however, had to be put it on hold for a while. “I wanted to explore that ‘DAME’ through conversations with fellow teachers, but since the first lockdown it has been all hands on deck to keep our education going.”
Lockdown
This applied not least to lecturers like Hut who had to translate practical education to the home situation. “Right at the start of the lockdown, we started looking at what the learning objectives of a subject were, and what frills we could leave out.” As an example, he cites the class on mass-spring systems. Hut was unable to give a lecture in Delft to introduce the subject, so he recorded a video explaining the unusual floor construction of columns and springs in Haarlems pop temple Patronaat. “Eventually, students had to make their own vibration-free measurement set-up. They were allowed to do that using materials they had at home. The engineering requirements thus went down, but the underlying learning objective was to learn to work with parametric design, and they still had to go through all the design steps.”
As a final assignment for his course, he had first-year students build a Rube Goldberg machine. “Normally, they have to form groups and create a demonstration set-up of a physical phenomenon, which we then assess at a Science Fair. Instead, we had them create an online chain reaction in which each group received a digital signal from the previous set-up, and in turn passed on a signal to the next group. The last signal – after 45 set-ups – caused a lamp on my desk to switch on. It was an enormous relief that it worked!”
Back to campus
Meanwhile, he is very happy that campus education has gotten underway again. “As teachers, we managed to provide great education under the circumstances, but those circumstances were far from ideal. When I walk through my classroom, I can often spot things going wrong from the corner of my eye, even before students ask for help. Now I will be able to look my students in the eye again and see whether the penny has dropped or whether I need to explain something again. Mentimeter is simply not a match for that."
