UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
In a light-hearted article in November’s MRS Bulletin, Alex King poses this question as it relates to the field of Materials. He argues that scientists are intrinsically optimistic – “let’s see if this works…” while engineers are intrinsically pessimists – “the factor of safety should be at least 2…”. He strengthens the argument by asking “would you want to fly in an aeroplane designed by an optimist?”. Which leaves us with the educational question: Should we be tuning our programmes to educate optimists or pessimists? [MRS Bulletin vol 30 p920, 2005]
