<p>This fall I’m going to WPI, a mid-tier engineering school in Massachusetts. I really enjoy mathematics, physics, chemistry, and writing computer programs - so I decided that double majoring in electrical/computer engineering and Computer Science would be a good way to get a little of everything. </p>
<p>However, my senior year I took the first two Project Lead the Way Classes at my High School. I thought that the material was interesting, and I didn’t think that the tests were very hard, but all of my engineering design projects stunk. </p>
<p>Our final project was to use lego mindstroms style building blocks to build a machine that sorted marbles. After two weeks of design and building, we ended up with a machine that fell apart every time we used it, and didn’t sort any marbles. Everyone else in the class made a perfect marble sorter. An hour before the teacher reviewed our project, we decided to destroy the entire thing and hope that we’d be able to exploit technicalities in the rubric. But then a few minutes before the teacher came around we decided that that might not be a good idea so we tried to rebuild it. </p>
<p>We ended up getting a 4% on the project, and the teacher said we should be ashamed of ourselves for engineering such a piece of garbage. </p>
<p>On many of my engineering projects the biggest obstacle was that I couldn’t stop laughing at how horrible my work was. </p>
<p>Although I’ve done well on the AP exams and classes that I’ve taken that deal with electricity and programming, I’m a little concerned about going into introductory electrical engineering classes. </p>
<p>Are Project Lead the Way classes anything like Introductory Electrical Engineering classes at college?</p>