Revision Of A Joint Bme, Me, And Ee/Comp.E Senior Engineering Design Seminar

In the fall term of 2003 the design instructors in BME, ME, and the combined EE/Computer Engineering senior design classes at Vanderbilt University collaborated in offering of a common one credit hour design seminar. The intent of the course was to jointly sponsor relevant guest speakers, to demonstrate the commonality of certain design topics, and to assist in the development of multidisciplinary design teams for projects in the four departments. Student grades were based upon attendance (a 5% loss per missed class) and a single end of semester term paper on one of several presented topics. We reported last year 1 on the initial results from that course structure. Students did not join multidisciplinary teams in significant numbers (BME’s 64 students gained only 4 outside majors, in exchange for 2 working on other major teams, for example.) Students resented the use of a sign-in sheet, and often would sign in and leave prior to a lecture. An end of term special student survey was done to elicit advice regarding this year’s offering. Major changes were instituted this year. Attendance was taken randomly using a sign-out sheet and attendance at some seminars was based upon in-class exercises. The initial class period involved an in-class design team exercise in which each team was comprised of two BMEs, one ME, and one EE or Comp. E student. This exercise was purposely intended to be a “mixer” to facilitate development of acquaintance of students with other majors. An integrated list of potential design projects was generated for all majors (rather than each instructor posting a listing to their class) and each project posted had suggested majors for the team to be formed. Non disciplinary homework exercises were generated for most lecture topics. The effect of these changes and the ensuing student body feedback will be discussed in this paper. P ge 10087.1 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” Introduction Senior design courses at Vanderbilt University in the departments of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering have long been stand-alone full year courses (3-3). Student exchanges between the design teams in BME and ME first took place in 2001-2002 school year, when 2 ME students joined BME teams. The Electrical and Computer engineering department began to require a senior design course in 2003-2004 for their majors requiring a design course (Electrical engineering and computer engineering), and the instructors involved agreed to collaborate on a common design seminar and in efforts to encourage development of multidisciplinary design teams. The primary result of this effort was the initiation of a senior design seminar 2 . The catalog description for the course was posed as: “Elements of Professional Engineering Practice. Professionalism, licensing, ethics and ethical issues, intellectual property, contracts, liability, risk, reliability and safety, interdisciplinary teams and team tools, the role of codes, standards and professional organizations, career, entrepreneurship, human factors and industrial design.” The stated intent of the seminar was “… the development of design skills through lectures about elements of the design process. This course will include seminars on: professionalism, licensing, ethics and ethical issues; intellectual property, patents and VU patent policies; contracts and liability; risks, reliability, safety and the work environment; career issues including jobs; graduate and professional studies; entrepreneurship; use of the www and other information resources; and others. “ There were several motivating factors for development of this course. Capstone engineering courses at several engineering schools 3 include “inter-departmental” or interdisciplinary design teams and our graduates indicate that they frequently work in an interdisciplinary environment. The curricular evolution reported here is part of an effort to provide our students experience in working in an interdisciplinary environment. BME and ME courses had, prior to the introduction of this course, begun student design projects in November, after the formal lecture material had been covered in class. The design seminar which continued for the entire term in parallel with design project work, permitted design projects to be started earlier. Design credit in BME and ME was dropped to 2 credit hours with the 3 rd hour becoming subsumed in the design seminar. A second motivating factor was the desire to facilitate development of multi-disciplinary student design projects. It was hoped that a mix-and-match of majors might be accomplished by having the students in a common seminar where faculty were invited to give presentations on projects requiring interdisciplinary teams. Another goal was to be able to bring in quality speakers one time, rather than requiring three speakers for each of the three majors. To further facilitate students’ ability to participate in interdisciplinary design projects, a common guideline was developed for senior design projects. In a related endeavor, the primary faculty negotiated with the University administration to P ge 10087.2 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” allow outside companies sponsoring projects to maintain their intellectual property rights in exchange for submission of, and participation in, senior design projects. Deliverables from the students were 1. Attendance (fulfilled by a sign-in sheet) and 2. A term paper on one of the lecture topics presented (with the exception of the careers and graduate school seminars.) The final grade for each student was based upon the term paper (graded by one of the instructors) discounted 5% for each class missed. The class met weekly from 4:10 to 5:00. Seminar speakers generally kept to the 50 minute time limit. The period immediately after the seminar was reserved for group meetings between interested students and persons needing interdisciplinary teams for their projects for the first half of the term. Seminar speakers generally presented using PowerPoint slide shows although two used a transparency projector. Two lectures originally planned for could not be filled (Entrepreneurship and Prototyping Processes), local speakers filled in (Contracts and User-Centered Design) for these sessions. The joint design seminar was offered in the fall of 2003. It was taken by 66 BME students, 50 ME students, and 20 EE/CE majors. Classes were held in a newly renovated multi-level amphitheatre design lecture hall which was one of the few rooms on campus adequate for such a large class size (136.) Students typically entered on the upper level, grabbed a drink, signed in, and then took places in the room. During a few of the lectures, several students exited class during the lecture using the upper level exit. Attempts to remedy this led to students expressing dissatisfaction with the conduct of the course which led to the development of a questionnaire to evaluate the students’ opinions regarding the course and content. The results of that questionnaire were reported here last year. Changes made in the course structure based on that experience were as follows: 1. attendance continued to be mandatory, and was taken more discretely through an in-class exercise or an end of class sign-out sheet. 2. Rather than an end of semester term paper being the only academic requirement, most of the class sessions included a homework or an in-class exercise (12 of 14 classes had exercises). 3. Students were permitted, penalty free, one dropped homework and one unexcused “cut”. The class enrolled 173 students in 2004 and it was again surveyed under the new structure. Results and discussion This section will report on and discuss eight main results of the above mentioned questionnaire (n=57). Appropriate comparisons will be made and discussed with respect to the results obtained from a similar questionnaire (n=60) in 2003. A discussion of the results affected by the changes made this year will be discussed, with recommendations for future offerings. 1. The students were asked which of the lecture topics should be continued (1) or eliminated (0). The summary statistics for this are given in Table 1, next page. P ge 10087.3 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” Table 1: Student questionnaire results, rank ordered seminar lectures for fall 2004 (n=57) and for fall 2003 (n=60). Lecture Topic Topic Mean Score – 2004 Topic Mean Score – 2003 Graduate and Professional Schools* 0.95 0.98 Teams and Teamwork* 0.85 0.58 Intellectual Property* 0.84 0.98 Entrepreneurship 0.83 n.a. Career Issues: Jobs and Placement* 0.81 0.95 Ethics* 0.80 0.86 Human Factors 0.75 n.a. Product Liability* 0.73 0.80 Safety in the workplace* 0.72 0.77 Reliability and testing* 0.65 0.80 Contracts* 0.63 0.74 Labor and labor issues* 0.62 0.48 Designsafe and Risk Management* 0.59 0.79 Prototyping 0.50 n.a. Finance and Accounting for Engineers dropped 0.73 Manufacturing cancelled 0.63 Building the user into the development cycle dropped 0.40 n.a. indicates that the subject was not applicable * indicates that the lecture topic and lecturer were repeated Discussion: Thirteen of the fourteen lecture topics given this last fall were recommended by the class as topics to continue in future year’s course offerings.