Stimulating curiosity and the ability to formulate technical questions in an electric circuits course using the question formulation technique (QFT)

One of the key goals as an educator is to stimulate the curiosity of students in order to instill a desire to further explore and learn the subject matter outside of the classroom. Another important goal, often underemphasized, is to enhance the student's ability to formulate questions relevant to the subject matter. In this paper, we describe a technique, called the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), which is well established in the K-12 environment, and elaborate on several ways in which QFT may be utilized to stimulate curiosity and hone question formulation ability in a core undergraduate engineering course, Electric Circuits. While many of the details of the QFT implementations are specific to the Electric Circuits course, the essential elements may easily be extrapolated to any core engineering course.