Pragmatic Approach to Teaching Introduction to Machine Design

This paper presents examples of teaching Mechanical Design using a pragmatic approach. The pedagogy used herein embeds real-world experience and projects into the curriculum by taking representative case studies from industry and creating course projects. The approach focuses on using sanity checks using free-body diagrams and hand-calculations, materials specification and proliferate used of commercial off the shelf parts supplier catalog data. Case studies from course projects are presented demonstrating the above skill set reinforcement. The assessment of the student work is presented as it is related to the ABET learning outcomes of the mechanical design curriculum track.