2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this Work in Progress paper, we describe two, two-credit engineering courses taken by all first-year engineering majors at our university. First-year engineering students in most universities and colleges take several courses in physics and calculus offered by physics and mathematics departments. These courses typically serve a wide range of majors and hence there is limited opportunity to draw connections between the material to engineering applications. This limited connection is one of the factors attributable to students feeling a disconnect between the foundational physics and mathematics courses they take and the engineering topics that drew them to the major in the first place. This disconnect has been identified as a contributing factor to the relatively large attrition of students out of engineering majors and disproportionately impacts students from minoritized groups. The courses described in this paper are explicitly designed to help students connect the physics and calculus courses they take in the first year to engineering applications, in addition to reinforcing physics and calculus concepts. These courses are taken in consecutive semesters in the students’ first-year, the first of which substitutes for the companion laboratory course to the Physics I course offered by the physics department. These courses take a design-and-build approach (as opposed to an experiment-and-measure approach) to topics such as kinematics and applications of integration such as in solving problems like in finding the center of mass of objects. Students gave very high ratings to the course overall in student evaluations, and cite the connections between mathematics and physics with engineering applications as one of the course’s strengths. Further, we believe that these courses are factors, among others, that contribute to the low attrition rate from our engineering program.