This semester’s collaborative class between industrial and systems engineering and the fine arts department may be the last of its kind.
Last semester, Elif Akcali, an associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, created a mandatory class that uses fine arts to teach engineering students how to communicate their work to a greater audience.
“Unless we can communicate these complex projects, the public won’t understand what the engineers do, and it’s a huge opportunity that’s missed,” Akcali said.
Engineering students taking the class this semester will have to turn in a drawing portfolio, a six- to eight-panel storyboard or comic and a four- to six-minute modern dance piece created with students from the dance performance program.
Akcali collaborated with dance, drawing and storytelling professors at UF to create a curriculum and offered the class for the first time in Fall 2013.
“It was really a grand experiment,” Akcali said. “We told them we might fail but to just come to class and do their best.”
However, due to the limited availability of dance professors to teach an interdisciplinary class, the grand experiment may be over. But Akcali remains positive about the impact of the course.
“Even if they’re the only class that gets to do this, I know they’re fundamentally changed,” she said.
Students like Rae Knopik, an 18-year-old UF dance performance freshman who worked with a team of engineering students last semester on a project, agreed the course helps promote academic growth outside students’ majors.
“It was actually a really cool experience because we were both — engineers and dancers — learning about the same topic and how to represent it in different visual areas,” she said.
Michelle Gauthreaux, a 22-year-old UF industrial and systems engineering senior, just started taking the class and said she thinks it will add the human factor to her project.
“We’re really good at math and the hard sciences, but it’s not always easy to explain that to other people,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 1/30/2014 under the headline "Engineering students dance, draw"]
