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Session 2566

Development of an Innovative Engineering Sciences and Systems Laboratory Course

Sheldon M. Jeter and Jacek Jarzynski

Georgia Institute of Technology

INTRODUCTION In the fall of 1999 Georgia Tech changed from a ten week quarter to a fifteen week semester schedule. This change created the need and opportunity to revise the undergraduate mechanical engineering curriculum. An important overall curriculum change was to discontinue the dual track curriculum that featured some concentration on either mechanical systems or thermal energy and fluid systems. The curriculum and schedule changes required an evaluation and redesign of our required undergraduate laboratory courses. One result was the design of a new and innovative engineering sciences and systems lab course that is the subject of this paper. Our intention was to develop a course that could be taught by many faculty members and graduate teaching assistants, use a wide range of existing physical resources, broaden the technological experience of the students, and develop the full range of communications skills. This paper describes the development and implementation of the new course and reviews our experience and the results of course evaluation from the first semester of instruction.

BACKGROUND Under the quarter system previously employed at Georgia Tech, a sequence of three undergraduate lab courses was required. These courses were an introductory instrumentation and methods course, an intermediate engineering science and systems course, and an advanced experimental project course.

The first course in the sequence was a three quarter hour introductory lab course that covered typical mechanical engineering instrumentation and basic experimental and statistical methods. This course included topics ranging from strain gages to viscometers.

The intermediate course was one of two three quarter hour offerings depending on a student’s curriculum track. We considered these to be engineering sciences and systems courses because of their coverage. An attempt was made in each course to study some phenomena, such as heat transfer, at the detailed engineering science level. An example was forced convection heat transfer. We also studied the same or some other closely related phenomenon in an application to a system, such as in heat exchanger performance. The course for mechanical systems students typically involved four experiments each usually lasting two weeks with each culminating with an oral and

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Jarzynski, J., & Jeter, S. M. (2000, June), Development Of An Innovative Engineering Sciences And Systems Laboratory Course Paper presented at 2000 Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri. 10.18260/1-2--8298