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.     

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.     

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.     

New Curriculum Reforms in a Geological Engineering Program

Recent curriculum revisions to the geological engineering program at Queen's University at Kingston in Canada have led to a more streamlined program incorporating modern engineering education practices. Following a carefully designed program philosophy, the emphasis in the core curriculum changes through the entire four‐year program in three progressive stages, from the acquisition of knowledge, to integration and analysis, and finally to synthesis and design. This is reflected in an increased concentration of mathematics and basic science courses in first and second year, engineering science courses in third year, and engineering design courses (capstone courses) in fourth year. Two tools which concisely illustrate the course curriculum and curriculum content are: (1) the flow sheet, which can contain a wealth of information, such as showing linkages between courses (e.g. how upper‐level courses can build on lower‐level courses through course prerequisites), the timing of various courses, courses taught within the home department (vs. other departments), and courses taught by professional engineers; and (2) the ternary phase diagram, which is a quantitative method of displaying engineering content within individual courses or an entire program and can clearly show patterns and trends in curriculum content with time. Such tools are useful for academic engineering programs which may have to undergo an accreditation review and are readily adapted to any other engineering fields of study. Other engineering elements woven throughout the program include strong interactions with professional engineering faculty, the use of student teams, enhanced communication skills, and exposure to important aspects of professional engineering practice such as engineering ethics and law. To ensure that the curriculum is kept current and relevant, formative evaluation instruments such as questionnaires are used in all years of study, and are also sent to recent graduates of the program. External reviews of the revised program have been positive, indicating that the program goals are being achieved.     

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 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.     

2006 Bernard M. Gordon Prize Lecture*: The Learning Factory: Industry‐Partnered Active Learning

On February 21, 2006, the National Academy of Engineering recognized the achievements of the Learning Factory with the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education. The co‐founders were commended “for creating the Learning Factory, where multidisciplinary student teams develop engineering leadership skills by working with industry to solve real‐world problems.” This paper describes the origins, motivation, philosophy, and implementation of the Learning Factory. The specific innovations of the Learning Factory partnership were: active learning facilities, called Learning Factories, that provide experiential reinforcement of engineering science, and a realization of its limitations; strong collaborations with industry through advisory boards, engineers in the classroom, and industry‐sponsored capstone design projects; practice‐based engineering courses integrating analytical and theoretical knowledge with manufacturing, design, business concepts, and professional skills; and dissemination to other academic institutions (domestic and international), government and industry.     

A Report on Mudd Design Workshop II: “Designing Design Education for the 21st Century”

This paper reports on a workshop on design education held at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in May 1999. Mudd Design Workshop II was intended to provide a forum that would bring together design educators, design researchers, and designers from industry, in order to focus exclusively on the teaching of design in engineering education for the next century. Sessions were devoted to (1) design projects in both cornerstone and capstone courses, and metrics for selecting projects; (2) discipline‐based and cross‐disciplinary design courses; and (3) pedagogy, technology, and assessment in design education. Major emergent themes included the desirability of design throughout the curriculum, focuses on coaching and on learning, roles of projects and interactive learning, and the need to better address the interactions of grading and learning. Participants' specific commitments to future actions are also given.     

Toying with a Capstone Design Course

Oakland University has pioneered a unique approach to capstone design projects. Multidisciplinary student groups invent a new electrical, mechanical, or electromechanical game or toy, design it, and build a working prototype. The prototype is then delivered to an internationally‐known toy and game agency. The best of the prototypes are then presented by the agency to major national and international game and toy companies. If the toy or game is selected for production, the possibility exists for significant financial benefit both for the school and the students. Real world considerations such as creativity, project feasibility, and costs (particularly in mass quantity), all factor into the ultimate student goal, which is to have their project selected by the agents. The burden of devising the projects is largely removed from the professor and copying from earlier projects is virtually impossible. Design of a good game or toy is often much more difficult than it appears—projects invariably knit together the many engineering skills a student has acquired through the course of obtaining a bachelor's degree as well as from the rest of their life experiences. Ultimately, the engineering school also benefits from these projects through the possibility of substantial publicity, either with local display of student projects, or through press coverage surrounding a successful project picked up by a major international toy company.     

Developing a Systems Approach to Engineering Problem Solving and Design of Experiments in a Racecar‐Based Laboratory Course

A capstone mechanical engineering laboratory course is being implemented at the University of South Carolina that develops the student's abilities to analyze complex mechanical and thermal systems, to design experiments, and to develop their professional skills. The course is based upon an integrated sequence of laboratory experiments on a Legends‐class racecar. This vehicle is chosen as the system of study because it provides opportunities for the students to apply the spectrum of their mechanical engineering knowledge. It's also exciting to the students. As the students progress through the series of experiments, they are increasingly involved in experimental design (selecting sensors, sensor locations and experimental operating conditions). The course culminates in a truly open‐ended design of an experiment of their choosing. This course development project is supported by the National Science Foundation's Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement Program, the NSF's Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement Program, and the University of South Carolina. This paper describes the work in progress.     

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.     

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.     

National Aerospace Design Competitions: Industry/University Partnerships

This paper describes the growth of the individual and team national undergraduate and graduate AIAA/Industry design competitions. These design competitions have been developed primarily to enhance the university capstone design education experience of both undergraduate and graduate aerospace engineering programs. The competitions represent an Industry/University partnership to improve the design capability of individuals, corporations and the nation at large. The AIAA serves as the facilitator in this process. The student design teams respond to RFPs developed by AIAA Technical Committees. The competitions are funded by interested corporations. The AIAA design competition model or template could easily be implemented by any professional engineering society to nurture and encourage student capstone design efforts in that society's discipline. Students, corporations, the AIAA and the nation benefit from these competitions which enhance the competitiveness of all of the participants and thereby the competitiveness of the national community. The paper also includes an assessment of these competitions and some thought about their future direction.     

Linking design process to customer satisfaction through virtual design of experiments

This work seeks to better understand how design processes affect design outcomes. Design process data were collected from journals kept as a part of mechanical engineering capstone design projects at Montana State University. Student processes were characterized by time coding journal entries using a 3 × 4 matrix of process variables. The data were modeled using a principal components artificial neural network, and the model used in a virtual designed experiment to obtain estimates for design process factors that significantly affect client satisfaction. Results indicate that greater client satisfaction is achieved through: greater problem definition (PD) activity and idea generation at conceptual design levels, and PD and engineering analysis activities at the system design level. Whereas, design activity at the detailed level associates with lower client satisfaction. These results support some aspects of existing models of “good” design process, and suggest adaptations of the models for novice designers.     

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.     

A New Senior Level Course in International Design

The internationalization of the design arena is incontestable. Although many engineering design educators support the idea of incorporating international design issues into engineering design courses, only a few engineering design programs appear to actually give proper consideration to these topics. We recently originated and developed a course entitled “International Design,” which we first team-taught in the Spring of 1997 at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in Ishikawa, Japan. The course, open to senior and graduate students of various engineering disciplines, featured lectures and a quarter long team design project. The philosophy and contents of the course are presented in this paper.     

Enhancing Engineering Students' Communication Skills Through Multimedia Instruction

After discussing the communication requirements in the engineering work place and what universities have done to prepare students for this environement, this article describes a project aimed at developing multimedia, interactive courseware for use by engineering students and faculty. This courseware is being designed to maximize student exposure to pragmatic communication processes and problem-solving without requiring engineering faculty to diminish the technical content of their courses. The article discusses design criteria, implementation issues, evaluation processes, and the time table for project completion.     

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.     

Industrial Sponsored Design Projects Addressed by Student Design Teams*

We have developed and implemented a four‐quarter design sequence starting in the spring of the junior year. The first course focuses on having teams of students take an industrial based project from inception through a conceptual design process culminating in a final design specification. The senior year sequence is structured to have three‐five member teams function as a type of “engineering consultant firm” to address externally sponsored projects. The teams initially work with the sponsor to develop a “Product Design Specification (PDS)” as the foundation of the project. The teams then develop the conceptual design of the project during the fall quarter in order to get sponsor approval to move toward final implementation or prototype development during the winter and early spring teams. The course culminates with a day long symposium where each team makes formal presentations of their project and designs to the campus community, the sponsor representatives, and invited guests from the local community and potential industrial sponsors. The paper will present the specifics of the Junior and Senior level courses, brief overviews of the related Sophomore and Junior prerequisite courses, the method of obtaining the industrial sponsors, team formation process, sample projects, and assessment results from the first two offerings of the sequence.     

Interdisciplinary Laboratory in Advanced Materials: A Team‐Oriented Inquiry‐Based Approach

Few opportunities exist in most undergraduate engineering curricula for students of different disciplines, even within engineering, to work together. This project demonstrates a way to interject such activities by bringing together students across disciplines from otherwise independent courses. In this first phase of activities at Tennessee Technological University (TTU), chemical engineering (ChE) students from a required laboratory course and mechanical engineering (ME) students from a design elective were brought together in a common interdisciplinary‐team inquiry‐based term project. This report summarizes the course objectives and structure, offers a brief synopsis of the outcomes and direction for the project.