Development Of An Introduction To Mechanical Engineering Design Course

Beginning in the Fall 2001 quarter, a course entitled “Introduction to Mechanical Engineering Design” (IMD) was offered to a group of 16 first year ME students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) on a trial basis. This course is intended to eventually replace a disjointed three-course sequence taught over the course of the first two years of the curriculum: Materials Processing, Engineering Design Graphics, and Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing. All three courses are currently required, as the information they present is certainly all relevant and necessary for graduating engineers. The manner in which it is presented, however, is in need of improvement. In reality, design engineers need to be able to combine and apply the skills learned in these classes to generate complete designs. IMD will teach students the same concepts as the existing courses, only the content will be taught in the context of two design projects spanning two 10-week quarters. In the new 2-quarter, 5-6 hours per week course, students complete one short design on paper and one larger, Rube Goldberg type design where all 16 students work together to design and build a functional system. Since IMD is only offered to freshmen, all analysis is based solely on fundamental physics. In this way, the students are exposed to the entire design process: concept generation; formalized design, analysis, and construction phases; and finally, testing and evaluation of the device(s). Motivation The Mechanical Engineering curriculum at RIT suffers from a lack of formal engineering design experience in the early years of undergraduate study. Students are introduced to Mechanical Engineering through a series of courses in Materials Processing, Engineering Design Graphics, and Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing over the course of their first two years. While these courses present information that is critical to the design process, the material is presented in a discontinuous method relying on a “you will need to use this later” justification. In addition, these courses are spread out over quarters 1, 2, and 6 in the course sequence, with no actual application to a comprehensive design project until the 11 quarter when they take Senior Design. By teaching the same material integrated with a project, students will immediately see the value of what they are learning, and will have more motivation to retain that knowledge. Since it is impossible to condense 3 quarters of existing course material into two, in addition to adding new material, more responsibility will be given to the students. They can only be presented with the basics in each area; the rest is up to them to discover on their own as the need arises. The ability to learn on their own is an invaluable skill that will serve them well in later ME courses. P ge 721.1 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2002, American Society for Engineering Education ABET has recently placed more of an emphasis on integrating design across the curriculum. RIT’s Mechanical Engineering department is responding to this need with the revival of Senior Interdisciplinary Design and the development of an upper-level Integrated Design course. This is in addition to the traditional capstone Senior Design, where students spend 2 quarters designing and building a project for external sponsors. Our first year students need a foundation in design education to prepare them for these courses, where they are given responsibility to design a product for a paying sponsor. In particular, ABET criteria c, e, and h should be addressed before students enroll in a Senior Design class. These criteria state that students should have: (c) an ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs. (e) an ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems. (h) the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context. Along a similar direction, members of the RIT Mechanical Engineering Industrial Advisory Committee expressed an interest in hiring students who are more self-directed, creative thinkers. The IAC also indicated that RIT’s graduates need to improve their communication skills. Some faculty within the department have incorporated small-scale, open-ended design and analysis projects in courses such as Statics, Dynamics, Materials Science, and Mechanics of Materials. However, many students have trouble with these open-ended problems, having been limited strictly to problem solving in their early classes. The students have also had little or no training in technical writing and many have difficulty conveying their ideas in a clear, concise manner. Often times these projects are not included in a particular offering of a course, so a student’s exposure to them also depends on the instructor. A number of other universities have either had a freshman or sophomore level mechanical engineering design course in place for many years or have started one in the recent past. These include Purdue University, Iowa State University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Boise State University [1-3]. These schools have all reported favorable views of their freshman or sophomore design courses with only the minor problems that come from offering a course for the first time. One potential stumbling block could be the lack of new student knowledge about machine components – gearing, nuts and bolts, springs, etc. With the existence of the Freshman Seminar class in RIT’s ME department, this will not be a problem as students spend part of that class disassembling and examining various machines. With the foundation in place for students to begin creating their own designs, and with the need for an early course to teach design methodology, this Introduction to Mechanical Engineering Design course will fit well within the ME curriculum. With the current rate of student attrition in the College of Engineering, and in light of the issues described above, it is in the Department’s best interest to attract student interest early and to ensure that these students are well prepared to work as engineers. The proposed course will target students in the first and second quarters of their second year at RIT. It will follow through from the initial problem definition to a final design and teach the required skills along the way in the context of the class design project. Examples of realistic applications-based engineering design problems will give students a taste of what is to come in their later classes – including P ge 721.2 Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2002, American Society for Engineering Education Senior Design, the capstone Mechanical Engineering course and in their future careers. This can be best done by introducing engineering design earlier in the curriculum in a comprehensive course that presents the different components of the design process in one complete package. Based on the feedback gathered and presented above, the objectives of offering a new Introduction to Mechanical Engineering Design course are then: • to deliver the existing three courses worth of material to the students in a more effective manner, without sacrificing too much content, • to expose students earlier in their educational careers to the types of challenges that they will confront later in classes, on co-op, and in their future engineering jobs, and • to present students with techniques that can be used for effectively solving open-ended design problems. Course Planning 16 students were selected at random from the incoming freshman class and invited to participate. The course size was determined based on computer facility limitations for a partner pilot course [4]. The partner course, Measurements, Instrumentation, and Controls (I and II) was developed to give freshmen experience in the lab, particularly with computer control of experiments and data acquisition. Goals for the course were taken from the curricular needs outlined above. Key points that the course was intended to address beyond what the current program offers were: • Approaches to effectively solving open-ended problems • Comprehensive design/design-and-build projects • Extending basic physics analysis to real-world engineering problems • Working productively in teams • Technical writing and presentations IMD met for two 1-hour blocks and two 2-hour blocks each week. Three texts were chosen for the class. The Mechanical Design Process (David G. Ullman) was used as a reference for the design process, Technical Sketching (Dale H. Besterfield and Robert E. O’Hagan) was used for classroom and homework sketching exercises and teaching drafting conventions, and Solid Modeling with I-DEAS (Sheryl A. Sorby) was used as an instruction reference when the class was learning I-DEAS. IMD met in a lab/classroom, where the students were seated at tables in groups of four. This setup lent itself very well to the team-based approach to in-class activities. Students were given surveys at the beginning of the quarter and asked whether they preferred working in groups or alone, whether they were decisive or indecisive, and whether they tended to think logically and work with facts or to think creatively and worry about the details later. Based on these surveys, four groups of four were assigned so that each had a mix of students with different responses to each question. The students completed one design on paper only and began work on an extensive design-andbuild project. Since this two-quarter course was intended to replace three one-quarter courses while adding more content, it would be impossible to include the same material in the same detail. The overall layout of the first quarter of the course was intended to support the students in their design projects.