Sonya Talton invented a self-cooling soda can. Miran Farah designed a spiral escalator, Hayden Huang an umbrella that won't turn inside out in a high wind. At least two student inventors at Johns Hopkins have filed for patents.
At the University of Maryland in College Park, freshmen engineering students are designing and building human-powered water pumps. Last year it was windmills.
All this, of course, might seem routine for engineering students. In fact, it signals a radical change in the way engineers are trained in America, a return to the more pragmatic methods of 30 years ago.
It is a change precipitated by a number of very visible engineering failures in the past decade or so, including defects in the Hubble space telescope (1990), the USS Stark's defense system against an Iraqi missile (1987) and the Three Mile Island nuclear plant (1979).
It is spurred by embarrassing questions from Congress, industry leaders, and even ordinary citizens as to why the United States was slipping behind other countries in the application of technology for commercial purposes.
Why is Japan, for instance, producing so many of the new products?
(Despite advances by American industry, most of the 10 top companies receiving patents in the United States for new products are Japanese. It's been like this since 1985.)
Accompanying the emphasis on pragmatic training is the re-introduction of design in the early stages of the undergraduate curriculum. Design is the essence of engineering. It is usually reserved for the junior or senior years. But universities from Maryland to Morgan, MIT to the University of Washington are determined to work it back into the entire curriculum.
At Hopkins, the undergraduate design course was created to stimulate students "to think both creatively and pragmatically, to appreciate the commercial application of what they design," says Martin Ramirez, who teaches it.
James Armstrong, a chemical engineering student, says the Hopkins course "opens your mind to design, and to how things originate in the first place.
"We were encouraged to think of problems and then try to find the solution," he says.
His most persistent problem occurred while he was traveling. Either his suitcase was too big or too little, he says. So he designed a reconfigurable bag that can be made large or small as needed. He is confident of a getting a patent for his invention.
The revisions in the engineering curricula, though slow to take hold, may have the inexorability of a returning tide. Thomas M. Regan, coordinator of the freshman program in engineering at Maryland, estimates that only about 10 percent of the nation's engineering schools offer design instruction early in the undergraduate curriculum, but "maybe 50 percent are thinking about it."
The intent is to correct some of the excesses brought by the revolution in training unleashed in America by the 1957 shock of Sputnik -- the launch of the first artificial earth satellite by the Russians.
It would be hard to exaggerate Sputnik's impact on the technological and scientific community in the United States. It undermined all presumptions about the superiority of U.S. scientific prowess. "Panic" was the word Dr. Regan chose to describe the reaction. Sputnik sparked the most serious revision in the teaching of engineering -- and eventually the practice -- that the profession had ever seen.
William S. Butcher, a senior engineering adviser at the National Science Foundation, which encouraged the revisions three decades ago, says, "Before, engineering students were taught how to make a road; you dealt with people who had experience, who had built roads or bridges. . . . Students were shown things and shown how to do it."
But after Sputnik, the whole discipline became more theoretical and abstract, more concerned with the examination of physical principles and less with teaching students how things are actually built. The preferred descriptive word was "scientific."
"The emphasis," says Dr. Regan, "was on the why, not the how."
Design was de-emphasized. Students were turned from the making of things to more esoteric investigations, say, the microscopic study of materials, or the nature of steel fractures. They moved closer to pure research.
The new "scientific" approach had its critics from the start. Among them was Eugene S. Ferguson, author of "Engineering and the Mind's Eye" and an emeritus history professor at the University of Delaware.
Dr. Ferguson faults the turn away from the pragmatic side of engineering and especially the de-emphasis on design. More recently, he has joined those who warn against what they regard as an overreliance on computer software in the design process.
What has been lost, he said, is "the intuitive feel for the way the material world works, and sometimes doesn't work."
This, he said, has contributed to spectacular engineering failures. In a 1993 article in American Heritage of Invention & Technology magazine he recalled the Hartford (Conn.) Civic Center, with its computer-designed "space frame" roof: In 1978 it collapsed under a load of snow.
As the emphasis in engineering instruction was altered after Sputnik, other changes affected the profession. More and more young people drawn to it lacked the background once so helpful to aspiring engineers.
"They don't seem to have much hands-on experience," said Dr. Ross B. Corotis, dean of the Hopkins School of Engineering. "We're getting students who were not taking cars apart when they were young, either because automobiles are too complicated these days or they don't have the inclination."
Thus, the profession started coming up short of what it had always had in abundance -- tinkerers.
The design courses -- especially those where actual objects are built -- are expected to encourage that more "sensual" (a word favored by Dr. Ferguson) approach to engineering.
These courses also include another departure: Students from different engineering disciplines are set to work on projects in teams. It is a method that stimulates a cooperative spirit and, according to Dr. Regan, "breaks down gender and minority boundaries that may exist."
"This is very unusual," said Sarah Christiano, a 23-year-old Hopkins electrical engineering student. "It is very difficult for engineers. Electrical and mechanical and civil engineers don't, or rarely, come in contact much with each other."
As the deficiencies in engineering education and practice became more evident, efforts were begun a little over a decade ago to fashion a more broadly educated engineer. Hopkins and other universities increased the number of courses in the humanities and social sciences required of engineering students.
They did this on their own, or under prodding by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, which sets standards and requirements for all engineering programs in the country, and which has been responding to the embarrassing questions constantly before the profession.
The board demands 16 undergraduate semester hours in humanities and social sciences. Dr. Ramirez's new graduate curriculum has courses in education, psychology and political science.
At Morgan State University there is a similar awareness of new challenges and constraints, and the social pressures forcing these changes.
"We have to be concerned with the environment, the types of materials we use, whether they are disposable or not; we have to be concerned with natural resources, whether we should be using coal or not -- all of these things," says Eugene M. DeLoatch, dean of the Engineering School.
To equip engineers with the necessary skills, Norman R. Augustine, chairman of Martin Marietta Corp., advocates extending their course of study from four years to five or even six years. Currently, to gain a bachelor's degree at Morgan, engineering students need 134 credit hours, 14 more than liberal arts students.
What challenges face engineers today that would require this kind of education? Why political science? Psychology?
One such challenge is that presented by the deterioration of the national infrastructure, the roads, bridges, pipelines, wires, and communications networks -- all the physical networks from coast to coast over which the myriad impulses of society are transmitted.
Those who will be called upon to put these physical systems to rights will have to appreciate the constraints on political leaders. They will have to know how to mobilize support for unglamorous maintenance expenditures.
In short, they will have to know things engineers never worried about before.