2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineers have to adapt to rapidly changing technology throughout their careers, and this is especially the case for selecting engineering components which often evolve quickly. A good engineer should base their decisions on a solid understanding of the pros and cons of components being considered. We believe that to best interpret engineering component specification sheets, one must understand the fundamentals of how a component works and the underlying physics governing their operation. Thus, evaluating engineering components is an appropriate platform to motivate life-long learning, which we propose by developing curiosity for how these components work. A curious engineer will be motivated to continue life-long learning throughout their career. To develop student curiosity, we have developed modules that are referred to as Engineering Component Curiosity Challenges (ECCCs). Each modules presents students with a set of engineering components that perform a similar function. Often these components are dissected so that students see their internal operation, but students are not told how the component function or their pros and cons. Rather, the students are challenged to hypothesize the how the components work and which design environments they would be best suited for. Then the students evaluate functioning components and learn the pros and cons from the fundamental physics and manufacture literature. Four modules were developed for a senior level mechanical engineering design class. The modules include a comparison of different rotary and linear bearings, a DC motor compared to a stepper motor, linear actuators with different gear ratios, rotary sensors of a potentiometer compared to an optical encoder, and a set of toy cars. This class is being taught in fall quarter 2024 with 81 students. This paper will present the results of surveys conducted at the beginning of the class, after each module, and also after the students will have worked on their capstone design project for 5 weeks. We will also evaluate student performance on a component analysis assignment that each student performs for their capstone project, and compare it to performance on the same assignment that from a prior year. We will assess knowledge gained by students in understanding the engineering components they evaluated, and also measure their level of curiosity based upon validated survey tools.