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Faith meets Innovation: AI Tools Reshaping Christian Engineering Higher Education
Get PDFIn the era of global Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration across diverse fields, its influence has extended into the educational landscape of Colleges and Universities. Within Higher Education, where pedagogical approaches emphasize critical thinking, problem-solving, logical reasoning, solution design, and product development, AI and its associated tools play a pivotal role, significantly impacting the fundamental learning processes of students. These tools seamlessly infiltrate classrooms, laboratories, and assignments, functioning as valuable assistant tools designed to enhance overall learning experiences.
Discussions in various forums, task forces, faculty meetings, and literature have raised pertinent questions regarding the embrace or skepticism towards AI in education. While businesses, organizations, and even Christian Educational institutions have already incorporated different forms of AI tools, the decision to integrate them into the teaching-learning paradigm remains a topic of debate, with both advantages and disadvantages. This paper aims to explore perspectives on the effective incorporation of AI and its tools into our daily professional and personal lives. Survey results suggest that AI may be used profitably in various ways in Christian higher education, although there are certain points in the learning process where its use will not be helpful
NNU Engineering Student Mission Projects from Peru to PNG to Kenya
Get PDFA substantial impact is being made around the world by Christian university student engineering teams collaborating with Christian mission organizations [1-3]. The application of engineering talents to meeting basic human physical and spiritual needs is perhaps the “highest calling” of engineers. These engineering projects meet basic human needs such as clean water, sanitation, agriculture, power generation, education, healthcare, housing, and disaster recovery. These efforts are complementary to secular humanitarian work done by organizations like Engineers Without Borders, EPICS, IEEE Humanitarian Technologies Board/SIGHT, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Lifelong impact is made not only in the lives of the assisted community, but also in the lives of the participating engineering students and faculty. These impacts will be illustrated in this paper by three stories of student teams from NNU Engineering who have teamed with villagers, non-profits, companies, church mission agencies, and even the IEEE to design, fund, construct, train, and follow-up on engineering projects around the world
Sustainability and The Engineer – Control vs. Sympathetic Citizenship in the Kingdom of God
Get PDFThe world is facing a sustainability crisis. Specifically, the pursuit of economic and societal progress is being pursued at the expense of the environment, and this is compromising the inheritance of future generations. Engineers play a role in this crisis in two significant ways – one, because we helped to cause it, and two, because we can play a meaningful role in either deepening it or addressing it. As we consider how to address the current crisis, we must critically examine the ways in which our practice of engineering helped us reach this point, because the paradigms that led us here are highly unlikely to lead us out of it. In this paper I will describe aspects of the traditional engineering mindset, including how engineers are taught to think of themselves specifically and humans generally in relation to the environment (or nonhuman creation), and how this mindset leads to environmental degradation. I will then offer and explore a new paradigm, one that rethinks the relationship between humans and their environment and that places the vocation of engineering in a theological context. By rethinking engineering in terms of these fundamental relationships (between God and engineer, between engineer and environment), we may be able to transform traditional tools and lenses of engineering decision-making to address the current crisis. Finally, I discuss various practical activities and means by which engineers and engineering students can develop this alternative way of seeing and thinking
Shalom Seeking: Contours for Flourishing
Get PDFJesus instructs us to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt 6:33) [1], which is no small task. Seeking the Kingdom is a process of striving to show God’s love by loving our neighbors and to the rest of the creation. It is serving them by enabling them to flourish. Seeking first the kingdom of God is striving for true progress in all its wholeness; it is seeking shalom. Shalom is an Old Testament word which refers to the restfulness, contentment, beauty, and harmony of life lived together in perfect obedience to God’s will. Shalom is a state of being in which everyone and everything is in right relationship all the time. The call to seek shalom, which includes our work as engineers, is no less than a call to lovingly meet the technological needs around us with the goal of flourishing the whole of creation.
This paper begins digging into the details of what it means to flourish and to be an instrument of flourishing through our work as engineers. Striving to seek shalom through our engineering work requires insights into how people and the rest of creation flourish, individually, but also in relationship with each other. Seeking first the kingdom of God requires knowledge of the Kingdom and our role in it. Therefore, I strive to develop a biblically-based and creationally-informed understanding of the basic contours of flourishing that can serve as the beginnings of a meaningful guide for living and engineering before the face of God (coram Deo)
