Corporate Structure in the Classroom: A Model for Teaching Engineering Design

摘要

Design in the engineering curriculum has received considerable attention over the last several years. Our experiences at Northern Arizona University with a senior level capstone engineering design course have demonstrated the educational value of complex and challenging design tasks performed on a real project for a real customer. Observing the design teams in action and evaluating the results of their efforts, however, clearly shows that the students enter the senior design course with strong analytical skills and endless enthusiasm but without adequate experience in doing design, dealing with uncertainty, working as part of a team, and implementing a complex project. To correct this lack of preparation we decided to implement some changes in our engineering curriculum and piloted an interdisciplinary sophomore level design course in the Fall 1994 semester. [1]The experimental course was structured as a simulated engineering company dealing with the design of robotic devices for use in hazardous materials handling. An interdisciplinary team of six faculty played the roles of company president, four division managers, and a quality manager. Thirty-three students played the roles of design engineers, with each division of the company having approximately two students from each of the four engineering disciplines (electrical, mechanical, civil / environmental, and computer science). A member of the college's industrial advisory board played the role of our customer, and our campus safety officer played the role of an Environmental Protection Agency representative. The course dealt with technical, legal, ethical, financial, and personnel issues and addressed problems of incomplete information, limited resources and materials availability, team dynamics, and employee and public safety. Communication and documentation were emphasized through written and e-mail status reports, design reviews, formal presentations, and the use of computer tools for scheduling, design, and presentation. The course ended up with four different working models of computer controlled robotic devicesand 33 students that can hardly wait for the next design course.The sophomore design course was a great success and has led each of the engineering departments to permanently incorporate sophomore and junior level interdisciplinary design courses into their programs of study. Both courses will be offered beginning in the Fall 1995 semester, and will be structured as one expanded engineering corporation.The challenge that we now face is to structure these courses with a reasonable student to faculty ratio while still maintaining the team teaching approach and the simulated corporate structure. This paper addresses these issues and describes the first offering of the two linked, interdisciplinary design courses.