NUMERICAL APPROACHES TO TEACHING ELECTROMAGNETICS - A HISTORICAL SKETCH AND LESSONS FROM STRUCTURAL-ENGINEERING

The use of numerical techniques in teaching engineering electromagneti cs appears to be the subject of intense debate. While electromagnetics continues to be taught as it was a generation ago, efforts at moderni zing the curriculum using the computer methods now used routinely in i ndustry are still controversial because of the crowded nature of the c urriculum. However, civil and aerospace engineers have already gone th rough a similar soul-searching in the teaching of structural engineeri ng. The mixture of explicit approaches and numerical approaches has no w reached a point of stability, and numerical techniques are routinely used in undergraduate education. The purpose of this article is to su rvey-for this special issue on integrating computational electromagnet ics into the traditional electromagnetics curriculum-recent historical developments in the use of numerical methods in electromagnetics educ ation and similar developments in the teaching of structural engineeri ng, and draw, from the latter, lessons relevant to the teaching of ele ctromagnetics.