2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The University of Denver (DU) has a Common Curriculum which provides students with a well-rounded education by creating a context for major or minor courses of study and introduces students to new areas of interest. One of the main elements of the common curriculum is a series of elective courses which cover “Scientific Inquiry: The Natural and Physical World” (SI-NPW). If a student is not an engineering or science major, they must choose one of these series while attending DU. Most of these electives are given by the School of Natural Science and Mathematics (NSM), but one series of courses was offered by the Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science (RSECS). This paper describes the first course of a three-part series of courses that was developed within RSECS to expose non-majors to aerospace engineering and space topics. This first course was named “Exploring Engineering Tools of Scientific Discovery (Engineering SciD) in Popular Culture”. In this case, the “Popular Culture” was the movie “The Martian”, and “The Exploring Engineering Tools of Scientific Discovery” was the tools of space exploration that lead us to learn more about our solar systems and corresponded to the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge title, “Engineering Tools of Scientific Discovery”. At the time this series was created, RSECS was becoming a National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge Scholars Program (NAE GCSP) school and incorporated that theme into new course offerings. Simultaneously, the school was also becoming part of the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), and we incorporated many elements of KEEN into the sequence of courses which stress the Entrepreneurial Mindset and the three C’s, Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value. Through a series of student surveys during the inaugural years of this course, it was clear that the methods and pedagogies used in this thematic course created an environment for non-major students to thrive and become curious about aerospace engineering and space topics. This paper describes several of the methods used to deliver the content to non-majors, reflections on the course’s success and failures, and results of student surveys that also indicate areas of success and failure.