2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Is it possible to have individual student machining projects at a large state university?

Presented at Mechanical Engineering (MECH) Session 7: Manufacturing, Laboratories, and Hands-On Learning

While working as a mechanical engineer does not necessary require that a person have machining experience, the case has been made by industry and academia that a good mechanical design engineer needs to have understanding and experience that can best be obtained from completing projects in a machine shop. The authors of this paper have had good success in implementing student machining projects in a course at a small private college. The course included students completing individual projects using both a manual and CNC mill and lathe. The course concentrated on machining tolerances, and also included CAD work to improve communications with shop personnel. The cohort size was usually around 50-60 students distributed among 3 sections. One of the authors would now like to implement the same type of projects at a large state university with a cohort of close to 400 students. This project is currently in the planning stages, and the authors are soliciting feedback. The main focuses of the project at this point are class structure and scheduling, TA organization and training, and development of course outcomes.

Authors

Dr. Scott F. Kiefer http://orcid.org/0009-0002-2982-1569 North Carolina State University [biography]

Scott Kiefer has spent the past twenty-five years teaching mechanical engineering at five different colleges. He started at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez in the traditional role of teaching and administering a modest graduate research program. At Trine University, a small private school in Angola, Indiana, he focused on undergraduate education while teaching ten different courses ranging from introductory freshman courses to senior capstone. Scott also served as an advisor to many different undergraduate research projects. He then moved on to Michigan State University and took a position as a teaching specialist concentrating on undergraduate classroom instruction. Scott then moved to York College of Pennsylvania where he spent thirteen years teaching all levels of mechanical engineering and helped countless students manufacture projects in the machine shop. He is now at North Carolina State University and hopes to be able to add more machining and hand-on experiences to the Mechanical Engineering Curriculum.
Dr. Stephen Andrew Wilkerson P.E. York College of Pennsylvania [biography]

Stephen Wilkerson (swilkerson@ycp.edu) received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1990 in Mechanical Engineering. His Thesis and initial work was on underwater explosion bubble dynamics and ship and submarine whipping. After graduation he took a

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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