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Project G: Multidisciplinary Teamwork Design at its Best

Abstract

This paper reports on the very impressive outcome of a project designed and built by a group of engineering students. The project was dubbed Project G (short for Godzilla). The students were all undergraduate students, from various graduating classes and mostly from all five of our engineering departments. Their teamwork and their problem-solving skills were very exemplary throughout the project duration. Furthermore, the students accomplished their task from beginning to end without any faculty supervision. An impressive accomplishment which, for us faculty, is interpreted as a testimony that we must, after all, be doing something right in class. Or so we hope at least.

Project G consists basically of a large Lego-built dragon that can move around, and spit fire. The intricacy in its details is a result of the countless hours that the students worked on it and the engineering problem solving skills that they demonstrated. Every step was documented and pictures and videos were recorded, a testimony to the high commitment to teamwork from this group of students who come from a wide variety of disciplines.

We describe project G in an informal manner, and all the steps and solutions along the way of its creation. We demonstrate that with proper preparation, a good selection of courses, a high commitment to teaching and learning, a university can educate its engineering students to solve, without supervision, a very difficult problem that they (and we) can be very proud of. We suggest in conclusion that though project G in its current form would not yet be suitable for a senior design capstone project, it would be a very good example for a multi-disciplinary engineering design project.

Background

In the summer of 2005, nine students served as camp counselors for the Introduction to Engineering Program1 (IEP) at the University of Notre Dame 2. IEP is a summer engineering camp for high school students who have just completed their junior year. There are two sessions of three weeks each. IEP’s purpose is to provide participants with an overview of all fields in engineering, while giving the students a taste of college life, a look at career opportunities, and a chance to meet professional engineers as well as engineering faculty. Students work on several projects, attend lectures, write reports, code programs, give presentations, and do problem solving and design. The IEP counselors assist the students in their projects during the sessions in the Engineering Learning Center, and help enforce the rules in the residence halls.

Seven of the nine IEP counselors were engineering students at Notre Dame (the other two were a pre-med student and a business student), and eight of them had either previously attended the camp back when they were in high school, or had worked as IEP counselors in previous summers. They ranged from sophomores to seniors and most of them were Engineering majors (Aerospace, Chemical, Computer, Mechanical, Electrical).

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Bualuan, R., & LeDonne, D., & Kurtz, S., & Blakely, J., & Slaboch, C., & Carter, A., & Barron, E., & Essien, P., & Wysocki, M., & Ferro, E. (2007, June), Project G: Multidisciplinary Teamwork Design At Its Best Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2901