Integrating Design into the Sophomore and Junior Level Mechanics Courses

Engineering schools across the country are developing ways of integrating design into their curriculum, and a question that often arises is how to best integrate design into the sophomore and junior level courses. Freshman design projects or mechanical dissection courses are designed to give the students hands-on experience in conceptual design and construction, with little if any of the mathematical modeling normally used in engineering design. The capstone senior design project is a true engineering design experience, where students draw from their background to conceptualize, analyze, model, refine, and optimize a product to meet design, manufacturing, and life cycle cost requirements. The sophomore and junior level courses should assist students in making the transition from the “seat-of-the-pants” freshman design approach to the engineering design approach required for the capstone experience and engineering practice. This paper summarizes a three year effort at integrating design into the Mechanics of Materials course, but the principal conclusions drawn would apply to most sophomore and junior engineering science courses.     

A Model Curriculum for a Capstone Course in Multidisciplinary Engineering Design

This paper describes our efforts to develop a curricular and pedagogical model for teaching multidisciplinary design to sen ior-level undergraduate engineering students. In our model, we address concerns of industry and engineering educators about the often narrow technical confines within which engineering design is currently taught. Our two-semester design sequence employs multidisciplinary teams of students working with faculty managers for industrial clients to solve complex, open-ended problems possessing numerous technical and non-technical constraints. After a two year pilot phase, the multidisciplinary senior design (MSD) course sequence is now offered to qualified Colorado School of Mines seniors each academic year and fully meets the senior capstone design requirement in each of the participating academic departments. An on-going formative and summative evaluation process allows us to monitor the perceptions and knowledge levels of our students compared with students completing traditional discipline-specific design courses. Our students, faculty, and clients overwhelmingly agree that multidisciplinary design teams tend to produce better engineering designs because of the broader range of expertise available to the team. MSD students strongly agree that higher order thinking skills such as open-ended problem-solving abilities, engineering analysis, and engineering synthesis are important aspects of the design process. Students also rate the course highly and indicate satisfaction with the course structure and curriculum. In addition, project clients are pleased with the quality of the final designs they receive from our students. Our experience has led us to conclude that undergraduate engineering students can thrive in a carefully designed multidisciplinary environment.     

The Sunrayce '95 Idea: Adding Hands-on Design to an Engineering Curriculum

During the 1994-95 academic year, Catalano taught a first-time senior capstone design class with the goal of entering a student-designed and built, solar-powered race car in the Department of Energy's Sunrayce '95 competition. This course came from an effort to move toward a more fully integrated mechanical engineering curriculum designed to supplement the learning experiences of students in their more traditional engineering courses. In this paper, we summarize the planning for the course, the design and construction phases of the class—especially how students and faculty perceived their design work, the cadets' perceptions of their learning during the class, and experiences of the students and faculty during the race. Teaching this new course provided insights into some of the dilemmas raised when changes to an existing curriculum are made.     

Elements of an Optimal Capstone Design Experience

This paper presents and assesses a framework for an engineering capstone design program. We explain how student preparation, project selection, and instructor mentorship are the three key elements that must be addressed before the capstone experience is ready for the students. Next, we describe a way to administer and execute the capstone design experience including design workshops and lead engineers. We describe the importance of assessing the capstone design experience and report recent assessment results of our framework. We comment specifically on what students thought were the most important aspects of their experience in engineering capstone design and provide quantitative insight into what parts of the framework are most important.     

The Learning Factory—A New Approach to Integrating Design and Manufacturing into the Engineering Curriculum

The Learning Factory is a new practice-based curriculum and physical facilities for product realization. Its goal is to provide an improved educational experience that emphasizes the interdependency of manufacturing and design in a business environment. The Learning Factory is the product of the Manufacturing Engineering Education Partnership (MEEP). This partnership is a unique collaboration of three major universities with strong engineering programs (Penn State, University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, University of Washington), a premier high-technology government laboratory (Sandia National Laboratories), over 100 corporate partners covering a wide spectrum of U.S. Industries, and the federal government that provided funding for this project through the ARPA Technology Reinvestment Program. As a result of this initiative, over 14,000 square feet of Learning Factory facilities have been built or renovated across the partner schools. In the first two years of operation, the Learning Factories have served over 2600 students. Four new courses, and a revamped senior projects course which integrate manufacturing, design and business concerns and make use of these facilities have been instituted. These courses are an integral part of a new curriculum option in Product Realization. The courses were developed by a unique team approach and their materials are available electronically over the World Wide Web. Industry partners provide real-world problems and are the customers for students in our senior capstone design courses. As of December 1996, over 200 interdisciplinary projects have been completed across the three schools. These projects involve teams of students from Industrial, Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical Engineering and Business. Forty-three faculty members, across five time zones, are engaged in this effort.     

A New Model For Integrating Engineering Into the Liberal Education of Non-Engineering Undergraduate Students

In this paper, I will discuss a new model that integrates engineering into the liberal education of all undergraduate students, regardless of their majors. The model was proposed in 1992 by the Manufacturing Engineering Department at Miami University and was approved as part of a new plan for liberal education for all students. The objective of the model is to provide students with an opportunity to learn about the engineering profession and design, including its links to technology and society. To achieve this objective, the new model includes: a 3 credit hour course, with lab, to learn about engineering and technology and their impact on society; a 3 course, 9 credit hour sequence to study, in-depth, engineering methods and modeling; and a 3–4 credit hour, two-course, senior capstone. The implementation of the model started in the Fall of 1993. A mechanism has been developed for assessing this model and its impact on students' learning and understanding of engineering, the classroom-learning environment, and its ability to attract and retain women and minorities to engineering.     

Designing a Senior Capstone Course to Satisfy Industrial Customers

It is sometimes forgotten that industry is an important customer of engineering education. Ignoring this relationship has produced graduates that often fail to meet the changing needs of industry in today's competitive environment. On the basis of feedback from our industrial customers, faculty from Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering at Brigham Young University have jointly developed a new senior capstone design course entitled “Integrated Product and Process Design.” This new capstone course is centered on industrial design and manufacturing projects. These projects involve both product and process design activities. Multidisciplinary teams of students are taught a structured development approach to produce typical industrial deliverables. These deliverables include a functional specification, product and process design, prototype, and first production sample. This paper identifies changing industrial needs, describes how the course was designed to meet these needs, and presents results from the initial offerings of the course.     

Engineering Design: A Partnership Approach

The capstone, two-semester, senior design sequence in the mechanical engineering curriculum was restructured and offered based upon a paradigm of partnership rather than competition. Partnership, requiring trust not only among the students but also of the professor, empowers students to view their responsibilities to their profession, their clients and employers, the public, and the environment in a much more personal and thus meaningful matter. The value-laden nature of the engineering profession and its historical attitudes and biases with respect to the natural world have been examined extensively.     

Implementation of Interdisciplinary Group Learning and Peer Assessment in a Nanotechnology Engineering Course

Nanotechnology is an inherently interdisciplinary field that has generated significant scientific and engineering interest in recent years. In an effort to convey the excitement and opportunities surrounding this discipline to senior undergraduate students and junior graduate students, a nanotechnology engineering course has been developed in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University over the past two years. This paper examines the unique challenges facing educators in this dynamic, emerging field and describes an approach for the design of a nanotechnology engineering course employing the non‐traditional pedagogical practices of collaborative group learning, interdisciplinary learning, problem‐based learning, and peer assessment. Utilizing the same nanotechnology course given the year before as a historical control, analysis of the difference between measures of student performance and student experience over the two years indicates that these practices are successful and provide an educationally informed template for other newly developed engineering courses.     

Writing Across the Chemical Engineering Curriculum at the University of North Dakota

In order to prepare engineering graduates with the written and oral communication skills needed in their professional careers a coordinated writing across the curriculum (WAC) program has developed in the chemical engineering department at the University of North Dakota. The students practice and develop their skills with writing assignments in both lecture and laboratory courses from the first-year level through the fourth-year capstone design course. The coordinated approach, especially in the four-semester laboratory sequence, allows the students to develop their skills by building on communication experiences in previous courses. The WAC program at UND including writing and public speaking assignments is described.     

On Effective Methods to Teach Mechanical Design

The Mechanical Engineering Department of the Pennsylvania State University has created a “real world” approach to the teaching of mechanical design. This paper describes the efforts to restructure the teaching methods and integrate more effectively the knowledge of the design of machine elements through an open-ended case study approach. It is a “just-in-time” learning method which uses the text book as a reference and prepares the students for their “capstone” design course, The “capstone” design course also has been redesigned to emphasize teamwork, scheduling, communication, ethics, and economics as well as application of analysis and prototype construction.     

Hands-On Experiences: An Integral Part of Engineering Curriculum Reform

The concept of “hands-on” experiences, through Mechanical Dissection classes, as a part of engineering curriculum reform is presented. Mechanical Dissection in this context refers to a process of studying the function of a mechanical system and dismantling it in order to see how its specific function is realized. The functions of various components within the artifact and interaction between the components are also studied. Awareness of the design process, multiple solutions to a design problem, and the evolution of the technology of various artifacts and their components are focused upon. This is followed by systematic re-assembly of the artifact. The courseware and supporting laboratory modules were developed to address specific objectives. They provide the foundation for better understanding of sophomore, junior and senior courses, particularly the design oriented ones. Seven in-depth dissection modules form the basis of this course. These are a weighing scale, a money sorting machine, an electric lawn mower, an electric hand drill, a gasoline engine, a centrifugal pump and an eighteen speed bike. This course is targeted at freshman or sophomore level engineering students. Some of these modules can be simplified and transported to K-14 students. Assessment of this course has shown an overwhelming positive response from students in all aspects. This makes the course an integral part of engineering curriculum reform.     

Senior/Sophomore Co-Class Instruction: Teaching Interpersonal Management Skills in Engineering

As society becomes increasingly technology-oriented, there is a growing demand for engineers and scientists to take a greater role in decision-making processes. The future success of our engineering graduates will increasingly depend on not only solid training in scientific and engineering principles, but also a more rigorous education in interpersonal management skills (IPMS). Co-class instruction of sophomore and senior engineering students provides an efficient educational structure to incorporate IPMS education into an existing engineering curriculum. Co-class instruction provides opportunities for senior students to experience direct subordinate supervisory technical management, develop project management skills, formally evaluate personnel performance and improve faculty/student contact. Younger students gain opportunities to see how their engineering education is applied and gives them an opportunity to network with graduating students. Co-class instruction did not significantly increase instructor workload, but does require that one instructor teach both sophomore and senior classes concurrently. Given the similarity in engineering curriculum structure, this method should be easily applicable to a wide range of engineering disciplines. Results indicate that students are highly receptive to co-class instruction, with excellent feedback.     

包装印刷材料实验课程化与学生创新思维培养

包装印刷材料实验课程化使得单纯的验证性实验转变为设计性实验,学生在综合设计各种材料的性能测试方案时,不仅能提高发现问题、分析问题、解决问题的能力,还能形成创新性思维。以广东工业大学为例,学校施行了包装印刷材料实践课程的教学改革,由此学生制定了制作四层瓦楞纸板并进行性能测试的课程实践方案,取得了较好的效果。实践证明：实验课程化有助于学生创新性思维的形成,值得总结和推广。     

The Impact of Group Size and Project Duration on Capstone Design

This paper discusses how group size and project duration impact capstone design in terms of learning objectives for the student, value to industry sponsors, and faculty resources. The analysis is based on survey results and an external faculty evaluation comparing a one‐semester offering with a two‐semester offering of capstone design in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition, we examine whether the stated learning objectives (technical writing skills, presentation skills, and technical analysis) for the course provide value to sponsors. Our findings suggest that the one‐semester offering was preferred by both students and industry sponsors and required fewer resources. We also found that although students prefer smaller group sizes, sponsors do not have a definitive preference. Finally, we found that although technical analysis is significantly correlated with dollar value to the sponsor, technical writing skills and presentation skills were not.     

A Paradigm for Assessing Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge in Engineering Students

Conceptual and procedural knowledge are two mutually‐supportive factors associated with the development of engineering skill. The present study extends previous work on undergraduate learning in engineering to provide further validation for an assessment paradigm capable of quantifying engineering students' conceptual and problem‐solving knowledge. Eight students who were enrolled in an introductory thermodynamics course and four who were enrolled in the course sequel provided verbal protocol data as they used instructional software. They were compared to existing data from a cohort of eleven science and engineering majors who had not taken thermodynamics. The results replicated earlier findings showing more cognitive activity on computer screens requiring overt user interaction compared to text‐based screens. The data also indicated that higher‐ versus lower‐performing students, based on course grades, engaged in more higher‐order cognitive processing. There was no evidence that students gained deeper cognitive processing as they advanced through the engineering curriculum.     

Delivery and Assessment of Senior Capstone Design via Distance Education

The University of North Dakota (UND) School of Engineering and Mines (SEM) Departments of Chemical, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering offer a unique capstone design course. The course is offered to distance education students at their industrial work sites using company‐based projects and industry mentors. Each department offers this course as partial fulfillment of an ABET‐accredited Bachelor of Science degree.     

Teaching Communication in Capstone Design: The Role of the Instructor in Situated Learning

Calls for engineers to communicate more effectively are ubiquitous, and engineering education literature includes numerous examples of assignments and courses that integrate writing and speaking with technical content. However, little of this literature examines in detail how engineering students develop communication skills and how those learning mechanisms influence classroom practice. To address this gap, this article synthesizes research on communication learning in college from the fields of composition and technical communication and illustrates its relevance to the engineering classroom with a case study of a capstone design course. The principles of situated learning and activity theory, in particular, provide strong evidence that the ways in which course instructors and students interact around communication tasks play a significant role in helping students develop transferable communication skills.