2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The ______ is a commissioning source ______, and as such, it strives to provide each graduate a well-rounded undergraduate education, grounded in a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) curriculum, in addition to military officership training to help each student prepare to become a leader in ______ immediately following their graduation. Mechanical Engineering 220 – Fundamentals of Mechanics (ME 220) is one of many STEM courses that all students, both engineering and non-engineering majors, are required to take. The curriculum focuses on statics and mechanics of materials. This course plays two key roles in the overall curriculum at ______. It is a required, or core, course and is most often the second of five engineering courses that every student is required to take, usually during their sophomore year. It is also the foundational course for students pursuing a degree in Mechanical Engineering or in Civil and Environmental Engineering. In its role as a core course, ME 220 is expected to satisfy certain institutional learning outcomes, specifically how to apply engineering methods; design methodology in particular. In the recent past, the course had fallen short in meeting several institutional outcomes. In a series of conversations and meetings, the department faculty and leadership specified the various deficiencies in the course with respect to meeting these outcomes, the most prominent of which was the lack of curriculum dedicated to teaching and practicing engineering design. To better achieve these outcomes, the course was redesigned during the summer of 2021. Three experimental sections of this course were taught to randomly assigned students during the Summer session and during the Fall semester of 2021. Ultimately, the new course design was fully adopted and was taught by 7 instructors to approximately 400 students in 17 sections during the Spring 2022 semester. With minor refinements to the course syllabus and projects after the Spring 2022 semester, the curriculum for ME 220 has stabilized and will continue to be taught with these meaningful design experiences into the future. A critical piece of the redesign is a new final project that is centered on a design-build-test experience that is accessible to all students, no matter their background or intended major. In this paper we will briefly discuss the previous course and how it has been adjusted to better address the institutional outcomes. We collected survey data from the students, where they self-assessed their abilities with respect to certain institutional outcomes, before the semester started and after the course concluded. The data include responses from students who were taught the heritage course during the Fall 2021 semester and these data will be compared and contrasted with the responses from the students who were taught and experienced the new curriculum during the Summer 2021, Fall 2021, and Spring 2022 semesters. The data show that student proficiencies remained the same for most institutional outcomes. One major highlight from the results is that student proficiency for the institutional outcome that targeted the understanding of prototyping increased more over the course of the semester with the course redesign than in previous semesters with the heritage course.