Virtual On line
June 22, 2020
June 22, 2020
June 26, 2021
Mechanical Engineering Technical Session: Capstone and Design
Mechanical Engineering
20
10.18260/1-2--34394
https://peer.asee.org/34394
224
Dr. Jamie Szwalek is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Dr. Yeow Siow has over fifteen years of combined experience as an engineering educator and practitioner. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from Michigan Technological University where he began his teaching career. He then joined Navistar's thermal-fluids system group as a senior engineer, and later brought his real-world expertise back into the classroom at Purdue University Calumet. He is currently a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he enjoys success in teaching and education research.
PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at University of Illinois at Chicago
Responding to the shifting world economies, significant changes have been made to Introduction to Engineering Design, a first-year course in the mechanical engineering curriculum at University of Illinois at Chicago since Fall 2018. In particular, "electrification" of student projects and learning outcomes has been front and center in the department's latest strategic planning. Leveraging recent literature and faculty expertise, an increasingly deeper integration of Arduino has since taken place, while attempting to maintain the core of team-based mechanical design using morphological methods. The focus of this paper is to identify the challenges and pitfalls in such an endeavor by reflecting on the process of change over three semesters of implementation, including the deployment of both top-down and bottom-up approaches. In particular, this paper will examine course content development, teaching staff management and training, student learning assessments, inventory and experiential enhancement, and communication improvement. Data from student self-assessment, instructor evaluations, final project demonstration results, and teaching assistant and instructor observations are also reported. One of the roadblocks experienced included hardware choices (e.g., unexpected interference among ultrasonic sensors) and the administrative team needed to quickly identify and implement alternatives without sacrificing student outcomes. Another major issue was student preparedness in coding prior to enrolling in this course and it became apparent that specially crafted exercises were essential for each student to build a successful electromechanical device. Additionally, the quality and quantity of the support staff, in particular undergraduate teaching assistants, were found to be more crucial than anticipated and a robust recruitment process became necessary. The high-stake design project in ME 250 changes each semester to prevent students from obtaining a set of solutions or project reports from prior terms, so teaching assistant training is continuous. The specifics of each problem encountered will be described in the paper, along with lesson learned on how best to handle each situation and create a structure where continuous improvement can be made sustainable.
Szwalek, J., & Siow, Y., & Rojas Robles, J. O. (2020, June), Design Course in a Mechanical Engineering Curriculum Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34394
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015