Success in engineering school is all about reading engineering problems. Success in engineering is all about writing engineering problems. I had a real inferiority complex in engineering school because everyone was always better than me... then we got to capstone design and these mutherfuckers didn't know how a doorknob worked. And, once shown, they couldn't take it apart, put it back together or repair it, let alone draw it or modify it. Sometimes you can get the unimaginative to grasp the issues of the boundless story problem by getting them to find the bounds. Iteration is a matter of understanding that the solution of the problem is the conditions of the next problem until you no longer care about the outcome. Sometimes.
I don't think a door knob is an example of a simple initiative designed. It's a really common object but it's actually quite complex and it likely not something most people could describe much less draw. I bet if you asked 100 engineers to draw a scketch of a door knob working mechanism you would get 90-95 different designs that look nothing like a door knob does
Your backyard furnace would be the kind of thing that would get you hired over another candidate.
If it were me, it's a story I'd remember for the interview. You're right that it might not fit for a programmer, but it might. It shows problem solving skills and a personal interest in learning new things. Sorry about bringing up a difficult topic.
That's pretty badass. How'd you keep the oxygen out?
And I think success in engineering school is about learning how to solve a problem where the method is given and the result is unknown. In my experience, in practice engineering is knowing the answer and then figuring out how various methods prove (or just as often disprove) that answer. I've tried this, and "unimaginative" is a good description. I had one success on Monday with "(blank) didn't have any effect" (which was the correct observation). Then today when trying to coax him into an observation he went back to "I could try (blank)." I'll have to think about why that didn't work.Sometimes you can get the unimaginative to grasp the issues of the boundless story problem by getting them to find the bounds.
Yep, it seems like most things go the road of "well, x is what I want/needs to happen given our current equipment/business processes, but y is what is currently happening. How do I get to x?" What about something along the lines of asking him to come up with multiple possible solutions, and then asking him to rank them with reasoning? Kind of promotes more typical problem solving and might indirectly lead him into the wonderful world of some basic principles of risk and project management.