Kevin Mackie
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Civil, Environmental & Construction Engineering

Year Awarded: 2009

Teaching Philosophy

I believe in challenging students with concepts and historical, theoretical, and contemporary problems while sharing my passion for the subject matter. Ensuring students are forced to think for themselves is essential. I accomplish this in my classes through team and individual problem-solving sessions, and compliance of theoretical, analytical, and computer approaches to problems. While theoretical knowledge is essential, often understanding is greatly furthered by example problems, diagrams, photos, field trips, hands-on experiments, and actual real-life structures. Examples include design competitions using toothpicks (or other household products), and group projects that overlap with classes in other engineering disciplines to encourage synergy, interaction, and cooperation.

My philosophy for teaching undergraduate students is to combine a sound understanding of basic mathematical and physical principles with a selection of all of the above concepts to maintain an interest in learning, and promote the desire to work or pursue higher degrees in structural engineering. Assessment of teaching objectives and philosophy is carried out continuously in the form of weekly quizzes, oral student presentations, anonymous web-based suggestions from students, and placement of students in engineering firms and graduate programs. Considerable emphasis is placed on the feedback provided by students in the form of student evaluations of instructor and the continuous improvement forms filled out that describe student experiences with course materials, textbooks, and any semester-specified teaching tool or strategy.

Computers are a huge part of any engineering project; thus, emphasis must be placed on correctly understanding both the input and output. Therefore, computers are introduced both as tools (for a full range of application such as modeling, solutions, and visualization) and as a means of assessing existing knowledge or assumptions. However, I greatly emphasize the potential problems of becoming dependent on computer output without a basic notion of how any structure would behave in a loading scenario. I believe there is little room for replacing basic engineering drawings, free-body diagrams, and simple concepts sketched out on paper or on the chalk/whiteboard – these remain a very efficient and clear means of communicating ideas, therefore I take great care to not depend solely on digital presentation of material.