SPEAKER: MAJ. BERNDT SPITTKA | CIVIL AND MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY
Coauthors: LTC Steve Hart & Dr. Chris Conley | United States Military Academy
Students will do just about anything that is asked of them, if their professors are willing to ask. The Goethals’ Infrastructure Challenge (GIC) was designed to inspire students to envision a better future, unleash their creativity, and apply their social, technical, political, and economic skills to address a “wicked problem.” The inspiration for developing this new competition was an identified gap in the currently offered Civil Engineering Student competitions and the need to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between engineering and the social sciences. The developers formulated the competition based on proven motivational and education theory. This academic year, West Point in conjunction with several other organizations completed the small and large scale pilot tests the GIC with stellar results. The focus of these pilots was to prove the concept of an online based, open-ended question competition’s ability to inspire students to achieve unique and applicable solutions to some of our most complex infrastructure problems, while meeting some of the most challenging ABET student outcomes required of Civil Engineering programs. Using proven metrics for evaluating student performance, the GIC pilots have shown that the nature of Civil Engineering student competitions is only limited by the creativity of those who are asking the students the questions. During these pilots, the students were able, in a four day competition, to create a solution to a wicked problem that encompassed not only a technical solution, but also address the problem’ s , political, social and economic aspects. The results show that once the students are asked the question they will try to (and do) rise to whatever challenge is presented to them. With successful pilots completed, the GIC will be offered nationwide starting in the spring of 2015.