Taking design off the drawing board

Roger Owen finds the engineering students he met on his most recent visits to China were a lot more talkative than those he first encountered in the mid-1980s.

What used to be one-sided lectures are now more like workshops at which students are eager to learn the latest developments in Owen's specialized field of computerized-engineering design.

"The students now are far more willing to speak their minds and ask questions, whereas 20 years ago, there might have been one or two questions at most," the 74-year-old says.