Work in Progress: An “Engineering for Everyone” Class that Incorporates Modeling, Simulation, and Biomimicry into the Engineering Design Process

This is a Work in Progress paper that describes our development of a first-year engineering class at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We are a comprehensive university with an engineering department. While we require our engineering students to take our introductory engineering classes, we also want to attract students from across campus to these courses, creating a culture of "engineering for everyone". This has several advantages, as it provides students in different majors with some exposure to engineering, and the academic diversity in the classroom enhances our activities and discussions. This paper focuses on one of our introductory engineering courses, APPL 101 Exploring Engineering, which exposes students to several aspects of the design process that are often overlooked in first year design experiences. With a series of mini-design activities, students develop mathematical models and simulations, and use their predictions to inform their system design. Then, they use biomimicry to brainstorm design ideas and a sustainability analysis to study the impact of their design on the sustainability issues. Through these activities, students learn programming skills in MATLAB, interpret the results of those simulations, and make connections with other fields, such as environmental sciences and biology. These activities appeal to students in many different majors. This class has been taught for four years although the first two years were impacted by COVID. As a result, this class is just starting to reach steady-state in terms of its content. Future assessment will consider the achievement of our student learning outcomes. In addition, for students who plan on an engineering major or minor, we will look at the impact of this class on retention in the program. For students who are outside of the engineering program, we will explore how this class has affected their acquisition of engineering skills and an appreciation for the importance of engineering.