Work in progress - stratifying the Introduction to Engineering Design course

Abstract

The Introduction to Engineering Design (IED) course must be a down-to-earth, meaningful and engaging encounter for the students, must meet the academic needs of the program, and must be manageable and affordable, all within a three or four credit hour framework. Commonly, this course is taken once in either the freshman or sophomore year. We are in the planning stages to split the IED course over our two-years, rather than keeping it in its current single-year form. The current IED will be combined with an existing one-hour Freshman Seminar (FS) course, required of freshman and meant to expose new students to college life in general, and to the engineering educational requirements. This FS course will be expanded to overlap some of the work done in the more-involved IED, allowing both our first- and second-year students to work together in each of their two years. The FS course will continue to introduce freshman to college, but will also have them work on current projects with sophomore students in IED as part of the design teams. Each project will have a layered team of the more experienced 2nd year students working with the newer 1st year students, more reflective of the situation in industry. Time in the 2nd year will be spent without the freshmen from FS, to allow a more in-depth look at engineering management, ethics, and economics for the sophomores.