I am currently working on a project for a class titled “Senior Design” it is supposed to be the capstone of my learning experience as an engineer, designed to teach me how to take a project from idea to implementation. The class steps through a series of required documents (project proposal, functional specification, project plan, and theory of operations) all of which can be useful tools (depending on your view of the agile methods).
Anyways, my issue is not with the documents themselves but with the format required for them. There are nearly ten teams with ten different projects in this class, but each team is required to mold its document to a single template (a 1990’s style formatted word document nonetheless).
The 21st Century is supposed to be about the knowledge worker (see Peter Drucker), so why do our schools still insist on teaching technological processes as if we were building software during the industrial revolution. We’re producing left-brained drones for a right-brained creative economy. Sure, there are some jobs that just require code monkeying or other forms of technological grunt labor, but those are not the jobs helping us survive the outsourcing onslaught in this country.
We should be teaching creativity and initiative. Templates create drones, they take intelligence and creativity and put it in a box from which it is very difficult to escape. Templates stifle innovation and don’t belong in the creative world. Rigid structure and format have their place, but that place is not in the creative realm.
Remember the class I was talking about? Senior Design, it sure doesn’t feel like it sometimes.
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