Interactive session: preaching what you practice model-based reasoning in engineering

One of the defining characteristics of engineering is the use of models in problem solving. Graphic models or cartoon-like depictions of an identified body of interest are used to design, to simulate, to test hypotheses and to make predictions. While students are repeatedly exposed to free body diagrams, circuit schematics and other forms of pictorial modeling in their textbooks and lectures, faculty repeatedly complain that students overlook the models and just seek an equation that they think fits the problem situation - a situation characterized as "plugging and chugging". This indicates that students do not fully understand the function these models serve as visual representations of mathematical models and provisional hypotheses of the problem space. The goal of this interactive workshop is to give engineering educators better tools to scaffold this process.