Conference Session

Engineering Courses for Non-engineers

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Bradley Bishop, United States Naval Academy

Tagged Divisions

Technological Literacy Constituent Committee

and several others offered by other departments. Of the 102students in Systems Engineering graduating class of 2008, 40 of them took the emergingtechnologies course or the honors equivalent. Our exist survey asked students to pick theirfavorite elective course, and emerging technologies ranked second overall, with a total of 17.3%of the votes (first place was Mobile Robot Design at 30%). Thus, slightly less than half of thestudents who took emerging technologies considered it the best of the five elective courses thatthey took. For a non-traditional course such as this to outshine all of the other electives in themajor is a strong testament to the impact of this different way of looking at technology and the

Conference Session

Engineering Courses for Non-engineers

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

John Blake, Austin Peay State University

Tagged Divisions

Technological Literacy Constituent Committee

components and subsystems, 3) that a system can fail due to failure of a very small part of the system, 4) that, despite the best efforts of all involved, the risk of failure exists. It also includes elements that demonstrate 5) an engineering team in action, including situations where major differences exist, 6) design within constraints (the CO2 filter problem) and the arbitrary nature of some design decisions (the existence of both square and round filter cartridges), and 7) dealing with uncertainty.Finally, 8) the story behind the Apollo program is used as an example of societal needs leading to the creation of technology.The decision to develop the technology and go to the moon came from a need for the