Engineering Interfaces

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Our goal is to better prepare engineering and business undergraduates for the highly technical professional challenges of the 21st century. We wish to instill, from the start, a broad-based understanding of the profession they are about to enter, a spirit of entrepreneurship, and an ability to adapt to a world where intense competition will require changing career paths. We will do this by developing a two integrated courses which focus on engineering's interfaces with society and the professional workplace. These courses will utilize active learning methods and will be broken into modules to facilitate export. These courses will both fill gaps in the engineering curriculum and provide students from other disciplines with the core of technically oriented concentrations which should serve them well in future endeavors. They are in response to deficiencies that we and others have identified and which parallel needs laid out in recent landmark reports on engineering education's future by the ASEE, NRC and NSF, and which are epitomized in ABET 2000. We build upon our prior NSF sponsored projects, augmented by the results of other NSF funded studies to: 1. Develop Engineering Interface Courses: a. The Essence of Engineering: The Relationship between Analysis and Design: In this first year course, students will learn how to apply the principles of engineering analysis to engineering design problems. Each design problem will be practical in nature and require substantial analysis to resolve. b. Balancing Cost, Schedule and Risk: This third year course will provide an appreciation of risk and ethics in order to resolve trade-offs among technical effort, time and risk. An emphasis will be placed on examining well-known engineering failures to understand why they occurred and how future potential malfunctions might be avoided. 2. Assess and Evaluate: Conduct a rigorous assessment and evaluation of these courses through development, pilot and implementation stages, with particula r attention devoted to reducing attrition by better meeting students' expectations of educational value, relevance, and quality. 3. Disseminate: A primary form of dissemination will be the preparation of text books and materials which to facilitate export and adaption at other engineering settings. Material will also be disseminated via conference presentations and the internet.