Work in Progress: Inclusion of an Engineering Design Experience in Freshman Introductory Engineering Courses at a Hispanic-serving Institution

Abstract The freshmen introductory engineering courses taught by three departments in the College of Engineering at _____ University have incorporated engineering design instruction and hands-on design projects in the last two years as part of NSF grant award ___. A primary objective of this grant is to increase the retention and persistence of minorities in the engineering programs by incorporating high-impact enrichment activities into courses early in the student's academic career. A logical course to include high-impact activities for freshmen is the introduction to engineering courses in the departments, which are known as "Engineering as a Career". This work presents the approach used for a hands-on design project presented by instructors in three similar courses and solicits feedback from other freshmen engineering practitioners. Preliminary retention data comparing the current course implementation to prior years when no design project was included is provided to assess effectiveness. In the chemical engineering introductory course, the hands-on design project involved the development of a simple water purification system to create clean non-potable water from silty water held in a pond. Student teams were provided with a set of supplies, and they were allowed to test components as a prototype. Many student's work led to experimental outcomes quite different from what they believed would occur, thus reinforcing the engineering design cycle of prototype-test-repeat. Student feedback indicated that they enjoyed working through the challenge using the engineering design approach, and the opportunity to conduct hands-on testing to gauge performance. The introductory course taught to electrical engineering and computer science students included a robot building team project and competition designed to further engage students with the course content. Project teams of 3 to 4 students were formed and given the task of assembling a robot chassis, including a Raspberry Pi credit card sized computer, and writing a basic guidance program in Python. A competition was held at the end of the semester to determine which team's robot could successfully follow a designated path in the shortest time period. Students reported this hands-on project to be an interesting combination of electrical engineering and computer science topics, and found the competition to be a compelling motivator. The mechanical engineering students worked on a 3D printing design project, where they designed a gyroscopic mechanism on SolidWorks and 3D-printed the design using an FDM based 3D-printer. Students were split into teams of 4 to develop a gyroscopic design on SolidWorks and later used the basic simulation tool to check for any potential design and assembly errors. The outcome of the projects indicated that the students showed high interest in designing. Based on the feedback from the students, the course was a good introduction to mechanical engineering with a good balance of hands-on projects and lectures. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.