La importancia de la educación en ingeniería de hoy

Throughout history engineering has continually interacted with the rest

of human society in a highly determinative and influential way. It has largely

freed man from physical drudgery and from the slavery of routine mental

tasks. It has provided the tools of new scientific discovery as well as those of

new creative art. It has provided the means of bringing to mankind the results

of the creative efforts of the great artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers

of both ancient and modern times. It has provided the facilities for man to

communicate with his fellowmen throughout the world. It has placed men

on the moon, and is now concerned with the problem of information explosion.

The engineer continually seeks new imaginative solutions to many of the

very real problems that confront mankind.

During the last decade, engineering has undergone a continuous transition

from the practical to the theoretical. This change had made technology

overlap with science. Engineering education today is quite different from

engineering education twenty years ago; it bears little resemblance to engineering

education at the turn of this century. Perhaps we shall not be able to

recognize engineering by the year 2000. Old branches are either updated or

phased out, and new branches are created out of necessity. The newest

offspring is software engineering which is the theme of this volume. For

decades engineering drawing was a subject required by all engineering colleges.

Today, it is being replaced in many schools by digital computation and

programming as a basic requirement.

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