2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of our first-year engineering course is to introduce students to the ABET seven student outcomes: 1) an ability to solve problems (utilizing computer-aided design) 2) an ability to apply engineering design 3) an ability to communicate effectively 4) an ability to apply professional ethics 5) an ability to work effectively in teams 6) an ability to design and conduct experiments and 7) an ability to acquire and apply new knowledge. Our courses have the additional challenge of fitting into a One Course at a Time block plan where students enroll in one course for 18 days of instruction. Due to the amount of content that we need to cover and the limited time for a design cycle, we utilize a term project that touches on each of the student outcomes and requires them to use 3D printing in the design.

The course is divided into two parts: lecture and a 3D modeling lab which each meet for 2 hours a day, except for Wednesdays where the students are required to meet with their term project groups. The lecture introduces them to engineering concepts and guides them through the engineering design process each week from brainstorming/researching their ideas (Week 1) to experimental data collection (Week 2) and data analysis with written communication (Week 3). The students are assessed on their progress through the project through engineering notebooks that are required to be updated after each group meeting and weekly presentations on the content of the week. For written communication, the students are assessed on a proposal due 2 weeks into the course, their engineering notebooks, and a final paper that details their entire project.

Our final challenge to the development of this course was how to help the students generate term project ideas efficiently, which is where we implemented the bio-inspired design constraint. Students are introduced to bio-inspired design on the first day of class and encouraged to use their own knowledge of nature to find a problem to solve. By using their own working knowledge, students usually find it easier to propose project ideas and find research to support their ideas fairly quickly. Our projects have ranged from using maple seeds to inspire new wind turbines to investigating the use of ram horns in phone protection.

Through this paper, we will detail how we were able to accomplish introducing all 7 student outcomes through the use of bio-inspiration in 18 days. We will also discuss our assessment methods for this project-based learning assignment and discuss some of the projects this unique curriculum design has been able to accomplish.