From T-Square to CAD
This week, it has been engineering. But instead of the old T-square which I mastered in my secondary school (Secondary Technical School Ovim, Abia State) and perfected in the peerless Federal University of Technology Owerri (Nigeria), I used CAD to create mechanical parts for a robot.
From calculus to engineering drawing, I have come to understand that everything in the Nigerian engineering curricula has value. The reason we may not see it that way is largely because we do not design. COREN has actually done a great job in our engineering curricula in Nigeria. You appreciate it when you concatenate those skills at design work.
The key question is building an industry where our students would practice those skills in Nigeria. That is very important. When they see that turning sand into a microprocessor involves solving extremely challenging differential equations at the level of transistors in order to send the right current while biasing them to trigger at the right operating model, they would appreciate that without calculus, there would not be a cellphones.
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But that has always been the case, the engineering curriculum centred on design principles and modelling; while in local applications, you rarely see such here.
Outside the engineering faculties, what we have are largely applications on installation, maintenance, operations, management, and then writing and updating small codes for already programmed control systems and their equivalents. It's a disconnection, because those Laplace transforms, Fourier series and transforms, partial and ordinary differential equations are rarely applied in those minor things we practice here.
It's either we grow the system to make the curriculum relevant here, or we modify it to suit our already sorry situation; instead of wasting people's time and living in abstracts.