Light and the Arts: A New Course for Engineers

An exposure to the arts is an essential part of every undergraduate's curriculum, but we feel that the course offerings adopted by most universities to acquaint their engineering students with the fine arts fail to meet their objective. Herein we describe a different type of fine arts course for engineers that approaches the subject matter through an avenue that they can see as valuable and empowering. The key objectives of the course are to approach the subject of fine art from a perspective where technology-oriented students would have an advantage, rather than a handicap; to exploit the experience so as to reinforce some aspects of engineering science by reviewing them in a new context; and to place the engineering students in an environment composed mostly of others in the same discipline.