2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Great Ideas for Teaching Students (GIFTS) paper describes a Design Methodology project. First-year engineering projects play an important role in retention by exposing students early in the curriculum to the type of work done by engineers. In the project described here, electrical and mechanical engineering students were divided into teams to design drones to deliver Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) packets intended to feed severely malnourished children. The main performance objective was to deliver as many RUTF packets as possible across a football field in 30 minutes as part of a drone competition.

The project exposed freshmen to all the major elements of design including cost, schedule, testing, reporting, communication, project management, and working in teams. While some technical specifications had to be modified during the course of the project, it ultimately achieved the primary learning objective of having students solve a real, ill-structured engineering problem of reasonable complexity with a humanitarian aspect that required innovation and creativity.