Teaching an Undergraduate Introductory Engineering Economics Course: Successful Implementation for Students Learning

Full Paper In our institution, we offer a one-quarter long "Engineering Economics" class for the Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) curriculum. This 2-credit course explores the economic principles in systematic evaluation of the benefits and costs associated with typical engineering projects. In particular, this course deals with formulating, estimating, and evaluating economic outcomes when alternatives to achieve a defined purpose are available. Therefore, the purpose of this course is to prepare our engineering students to be qualified to seek solutions to engineering problems/projects in context of economic viability. Plus, this course also helps our students to be better prepared for the Fundamental of Engineering (FE) exam. Students, taking the FE exam, are expected to get about 8 to 10 problems from Engineering Economics. All the authors of this paper have taught Engineering Economics several times. Therefore, the authors will demonstrate in this paper the course elements and the teaching methodologies in detail that each has practiced implementing the course objectives and to achieve the targeted outcomes. This course is designed in such a way so that it fits for both the ME and MET students. However, the MET students are more "hands-on" and have less mathematic knowledge than ME students. The MET students have mathematical knowledge up to Calculus II, whereas the ME students have mathematical knowledge up to Calculus IV and Differential Equations. This study will also compare the overall performance of the ME and MET students.