Molly W. Berger

Carroll has a four-volume collection of “The Young Engineers” books, a juvenile series from the early nineteen-teens that chronicles adventures in Colorado, Arizona, Mexico, and Nevada of two young men whose “aspirations pointed to the great constructive work that is done by the big-minded, resourceful American civil engineer of today.” Carroll loved to talk about these stories both in class and with his graduate students, demonstrating both a love for the artifacts themselves—the weathered volumes now nearly one hundred years old—as well as the stories that engendered in all of us a fascination with the way ideas about technology and engineering manifest themselves in popular culture.

Carroll’s enthusiasm for juvenile literature—and popular culture more broadly—has led me to incorporate explorations of popular culture into my own teaching. This past year, I taught a first year seminar, enrolling mostly engineering students, which investigated the relationship between computer technology and popular culture. We met in three very different classrooms: our own campus high-tech seminar room, a virtual classroom in Second Life where students adopted avatars and communicated online, and a low-income neighborhood computer center, where my students helped teach senior adults how to use computers. Thus, a new generation of “young engineers” went on an adventure, buoyed by theoretical readings, which encouraged them to examine their potential role in designing future material and virtual worlds. This paper will draw on classroom experiences from my recent course, “Culture and Computers,” and make arguments for the incorporation of popular culture into the curriculum as a way to encourage critical thinking about technology, past and future.