2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As part of a process of curricular review and improvement a group of faculty members of the Engineering Department were tasked with considering the development of a semester long junior design course. There was a general informal perception among department faculty that students entering the senior design year-long course sequence lacked certain desired skills, knowledge, and dispositions. This was coupled with feedback from the department’s industrial advisory board which regularly reviews students senior design projects in the fall and spring. Finally, a survey was conducted of recent alumni as to their experiences and confidence both before and after the senior design course. These inputs to designing the junior course suggested that although students had exposure and experience with teamwork, oral and written communication, and a variety of so-called soft skills, they felt less confident in their software programming and maker mechanical skills. This was true regardless of their concentration in mechanical, materials, electrical or computer engineering, the four concentrations offered for the BSE degree at the University. As a result, the basic design for the course is to have two parts. The first is to start with a build of a common platform. This allows students in the teams (3-4) to level-up their build confidence with both electrical and mechanical components and systems. Once the basic system platform is built, each team will propose some addition or modification to the frame. For example, in the first year of offering this course the basic system platform will be a rover and extensions might include manipulator arms, ultrasonic distance sensing for navigation, cameras and other sensors and actuators. The teams will learn to go through the design process with steps of problem definition, ideation, specification, prototyping, test and measurement and process iteration. This will allow a multidisciplinary team of engineering undergraduates to have more of an experience of design with iterative steps than is currently possible. They will also be able to have more authentic experiences of project reporting with periodic reviews or quick poster spotlights as well as having to work with integration of hardware and software systems. All these elements should better prepare the students for the follow-on senior design (capstone) course, where the projects are more complex and more open-ended. As a work-in-progress, details of the course structure and materials will be presented, learning assessment approaches will be proposed and discussed, and preliminary assessment results from the initial offering will be described, but detailed assessment and evaluation will not occur until after the 2022-2023 academic year.