Building an Innovative Engineering Curriculum from the Ground Up: Lessons and Success Stories

It is challenging to build brand new Engineering programs at a liberal arts college. This work outlines the 5-year development process of Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. While challenged with limited number of major classes besides liberal arts courses, engineering courses were developed by embedding lab components for each one. The sequence and course content structure were discussed throughout the paper with project examples. Creative ways of a large makerspace utilization for projects and teaching platform development were detailed. In a new program, developing a culture and legacies is as important as the courses themselves, which were discussed in detail. Several best practices of classroom management, lab utilization, project execution, and collaborations between upper and level classmen that sparked and inspired ideas were detailed in this reflective paper, which will give guidance to new programs as well as established programs who are looking into revising their curriculum.