Scaling an Aerospace Engineering Senior Design Program to Handle Increased Enrollment

Kathryn Anne Wingate; Marcus Holzinger

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Aerospace Division (AERO) Technical Session 2
Tagged Division: Aerospace Division (AERO)
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/47955

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Paper Authors

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Kathryn Anne Wingate University of Colorado Boulder

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Dr. Kathryn Wingate is an associate teaching professor at University of Colorado Boulder, where she teaches design and mechanics courses. She holds her PhD in mechanical engineering, and worked at NGAS as a materials scientist.

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Marcus Holzinger University of Colorado Boulder

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Abstract

This paper will detail the approach taken to scale an aerospace senior design course at a large R1 institution with an undergraduate enrollment that has more than doubled within a 10-year span. The paper covers the initial course structure, the challenges encountered as enrollment increased, and the subsequent restructure of the course to address these issues. A sentiment analysis of course FCQs over the past 10 years will be performed to understand the student view of the course before and after the restructure occurred. The initial senior design course spanned two-semesters, and each student team had their own aerospace project which was provided by an industry sponsor. In the fall, student teams utilized requirements, trades, and analysis to develop a detailed design. In the spring, teams focused on fabrication, integration, and testing of the system to verify requirements. In 2013, there were eight student teams. Two faculty members would jointly advise two teams. Team design progress was assessed through the academic year by five design reviews and two design reports.

As the number of teams grew from 8 in 2013 to 19 in 2021, the course encountered several challenges. It was challenging to find 19 different aerospace projects from industry sponsors. Each faculty advisor now had to solely advise two teams, each with a different industry sponsored project. Ensuring that faculty advisors had the right technical expertise for these diverse projects became difficult. Manage 19 separate projects during design reviews, manufacturing, and test became arduous. The increase in workload across faculty and staff motivated significant restructuring of the course.

To address these issues, in the fall of 2022 the department moved away from industry sponsors developing projects. Instead, faculty advisors each develop a single project in their research area, and advise three teams on the same project. A red team- blue team -gold team scenario is used where each team develops different designs to accomplish the same project. Faculty advisors are now technical experts in the design. The course is still subsidized by industry sponsors, who have the option to mentor a team. With these changes, the course instructional team is now managing a total of 7 projects instead of 21 projects.

However, the impact of increased enrollment and the corresponding restructure on the student viewpoint of the course is not well understood. Therefore, a sentiment analysis will be employed to study student evaluations of course over the past ten years. The sentiment analysis will discern trends of student satisfaction and understanding on a Likert scale and will be compared with anonymous student scores over available data. The amalgamation of sentiment analysis, clustering, and emergent topic modeling via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) will identifying recurring themes in feedback. This will allow a deeper understanding of the student impressions of the course prior to the restructuring, during the roll out year, and in the first year of the restructured course. This analysis can be utilized to drive future changes of the senior design course.

Citation
Format

Wingate, K. A., & Holzinger, M. (2024, June), Scaling an Aerospace Engineering Senior Design Program to Handle Increased Enrollment Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47955

TY - CPAPER
AB - This paper will detail the approach taken to scale an aerospace senior design course at a large R1 institution with an undergraduate enrollment that has more than doubled within a 10-year span. The paper covers the initial course structure, the challenges encountered as enrollment increased, and the subsequent restructure of the course to address these issues. A sentiment analysis of course FCQs over the past 10 years will be performed to understand the student view of the course before and after the restructure occurred.

The initial senior design course spanned two-semesters, and each student team had their own aerospace project which was provided by an industry sponsor. In the fall, student teams utilized requirements, trades, and analysis to develop a detailed design. In the spring, teams focused on fabrication, integration, and testing of the system to verify requirements. In 2013, there were eight student teams. Two faculty members would jointly advise two teams. Team design progress was assessed through the academic year by five design reviews and two design reports.

As the number of teams grew from 8 in 2013 to 19 in 2021, the course encountered several challenges. It was challenging to find 19 different aerospace projects from industry sponsors. Each faculty advisor now had to solely advise two teams, each with a different industry sponsored project. Ensuring that faculty advisors had the right technical expertise for these diverse projects became difficult. Manage 19 separate projects during design reviews, manufacturing, and test became arduous. The increase in workload across faculty and staff motivated significant restructuring of the course.

To address these issues, in the fall of 2022 the department moved away from industry sponsors developing projects. Instead, faculty advisors each develop a single project in their research area, and advise three teams on the same project. A red team- blue team -gold team scenario is used where each team develops different designs to accomplish the same project. Faculty advisors are now technical experts in the design. The course is still subsidized by industry sponsors, who have the option to mentor a team. With these changes, the course instructional team is now managing a total of 7 projects instead of 21 projects.

However, the impact of increased enrollment and the corresponding restructure on the student viewpoint of the course is not well understood. Therefore, a sentiment analysis will be employed to study student evaluations of course over the past ten years. The sentiment analysis will discern trends of student satisfaction and understanding on a Likert scale and will be compared with anonymous student scores over available data. The amalgamation of sentiment analysis, clustering, and emergent topic modeling via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) will identifying recurring themes in feedback. This will allow a deeper understanding of the student impressions of the course prior to the restructuring, during the roll out year, and in the first year of the restructured course. This analysis can be utilized to drive future changes of the senior design course.

AU - Kathryn Anne Wingate
AU - Marcus Holzinger
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Scaling an Aerospace Engineering Senior Design Program to Handle Increased Enrollment
UR - https://peer.asee.org/47955
ER -