Systematic Design of a First-Year Mechanical Engineering ... - CiteSeerX

Systematic Design of a First-Year Mechanical Engineering Course at Carnegie Mellon University SUSAN A. AMBROSE Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence Carnegie Mellon University

CRISTINA H. AMON Department of Mechanical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University

ABSTRACT Carnegie Mellon University offers a first-year course titled Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering to introduce undergraduate students to the discipline of mechanical engineering. The goals of the course are to excite students about the field of mechanical engineering early in their careers, introduce basic mechanical engineering concepts in an integrated way, provide a link to the basic physics and mathematics courses, and present design and problem-solving skills as central engineering activities. These goals are met through a combination of real-world engineering examples, classroom demonstrations, and hands-on experience in assignments and laboratories. Over the eleven semesters that this course has been taught, teams of first-year students have designed and assembled energy conversion mechanisms using miniature steam engines and Meccano sets to drive a mobile vehicle or to generate electricity for lighting a bulb. This paper describes the systematic process used to design this course and emphasizes this process of carefully integrating lectures with classroom demonstrations, laboratory experiments and hands-on projects to encourage students’ active learning.

I. INTRODUCTION A recent report by the committee on Engineering Design Theory and Methodology of the National Research Council emphasized the increasing need for more design and project-oriented experiences in undergraduate engineering programs,1 in part due to the scarcity of practical, hands-on experience in our nation’s precollege education. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has also increased and reinforced the design requirements since the late seventies.2 As a response to these needs, many colleges and universities have included hands-on projects in engineering curricula and have developed capstone design courses in an attempt to better prepare graduating engineers for addressing practical engineering problems. These courses range in length from part of a semester to one academic year, and in structure from individual to group projects;3 they may involve engineering design, April 1997

hands-on projects and prototype development, engineering design studio, and engineering project management.4-6 However, most of these design courses are beyond the firstyear, after the student has chosen a specific engineering career. Concern for attrition in engineering students has motivated many engineering schools to revise their undergraduate curricula and, particularly, to take a closer look at what students learn in their first-year.7 In the early 1990s, many engineering programs started offering project-based first-year courses,8-11 in addition to general introduction-to-engineering courses focused only on technical content such as engineering graphics and computing. These courses allow the integration of a variety of skills, hands-on experiences, and disciplinary approaches as needed to understand and solve a design problem. Members of the ECSEL coalition, which includes the University of Maryland, Howard University, and City College of New York among others, created engineering design courses which are integrated throughout the curriculum and start at the first-year level, in an attempt to stimulate creativity and motivate students who are attracted to engineering.9 Members of the SUCCEED Engineering Education Coalition introduced a first-year studio course with hands-on engineering practice and multi-disciplinary design projects.10 To increase retention rates, some engineering schools are converting introduction-to-engineering courses into vital support programs that help students develop study skills, generate enthusiasm for engineering, and instill a sense of membership in the academic community.7 All of these courses are general engineering first-year courses as opposed to discipline specific. In 1990, the Engineering College at Carnegie Mellon commissioned each of the six engineering departments to develop a domain-specific first-year introductory engineering course to be taught every semester starting in Fall ‘91. Students are required to take two of these courses—one each semester during their first-year. These first-year engineering courses are 12-unit courses, which represent the expected number of hours per week a student should spend on a course. These 12 hours include both in-class and out of class time. The first-year engineering courses correspond to about 30% of the first-year course load. The Mechanical Engineering first-year course combines three lectures and two-hour recitations per week with laboratory experiments, classroom demonstrations, and hands-on experience in the homework and laboratory. It includes fundamental concepts, problem-solving skills, and real-world examples with which students are familiar as well as weekly hands-on projects and design competition among teams of students.

II. BACKGROUND Since the 1940s, the Carnegie Plan of Professional Education has been a vital component of the educational objectives of the EnJournal of Engineering Education 173

gineering College at Carnegie Mellon. The Carnegie Plan purports to help each student acquire some skills especially important to engineering education, including among others: • a thorough and integrated understanding of fundamental knowledge in the fields of a student’s major interest and the ability to apply this knowledge to the formulation and solution of real problems; • a genuine competence in the orderly way of thinking which professional engineers have always used in reaching sound, creative conclusions: to the end that after graduation the student can, by such thinking, reach decisions in higher professional work and as a citizen; • an ability to continue to learn with scholarly orderliness so that after graduation the student will be able to grow in wisdom and keep abreast of the changing knowledge and problems of the profession and the society in which he or she lives; • the philosophical outlook, breadth of knowledge, and sense of values which will increase the student’s understanding and enjoyment of life and enable him or her to recognize and deal effectively with the human, economic, and social aspects of professional problems; and • the ability to communicate ideas to others. In keeping with this tradition, the Engineering College at Carnegie Mellon made significant changes in the curriculum several years ago in response to the changing and increasing demands on engineering graduates. In an attempt to assure that we graduate students who meet the needs of a changing society and who will become life-long learners, the College of Engineering: • created first-year introductory engineering courses in each of the six engineering departments to expose students to engineering disciplines and methodologies early in their academic careers so that they can make an informed decision about which engineering program to enroll in by the end of the first-year; • retained the liberal arts requirements which make up approximately 20 % of the student’s program to assure that our engineering graduates are well rounded individuals; • reduced the course load in the first-year from five courses to four so that students can concentrate on learning fewer subjects well; • made the engineering curriculum more flexible by increasing the number of technical and free elective courses within each major to permit greater diversity in student endeavors; students can then appreciate the breadth of career opportunities that await them and can pursue directions that are more appealing to their interests, career goals and talents; • instituted designated minors within the college of engineering and other colleges, such as in Design, Manufacturing Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering to promote flexibility and diversity among students; and • developed multi-disciplinary, project-oriented courses that promote students’ creativity and encourage team work and hands-on experience. For example, the Wearable Computers Design course created by the Engineering Design Research Center (EDRC) at Carnegie Mellon which integrates research and education through industry-sponsored design projects, producing a new generation of engineering gradu174

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ates with experience in design theory, design practice, and team work .5,6 The most dramatic of these changes was the creation of firstyear introductory engineering courses—one in each of the six departments—taught for the first time in the Fall of 1991. The new curriculum requires that students take two of these courses—one each semester during their first-year. These courses expose students to engineering from the onset, enabling them to gain breadth across disciplines, relate basic first-year physics and mathematics courses to engineering subjects, begin to acquire problem-solving skills, and become acquainted with major disciplines before they must choose a major at the end of their first-year.12,13,14 This paper focuses on the development, implementation and evaluation of the introductory course in mechanical engineering and describes the design principles we explicitly applied in creating this course.

III. THE DEVELOPMENT PHASE We began the development phase of the Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering course by considering five factors—audience, objectives, scope and content, learning activities, and feedback. These factors are identified by Davidson and Ambroses’s Research-Teaching Analogy15 shown in Table 1 and are partially addressed by the American Association for Higher Education’s16 Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education noted in Table 2. A. Who Was Our Audience and How Would That Impact the Course? We knew that our students would be bright, at the top of their high-school class, and high-score achievers on measures like SATs. However, we also knew that many of them came from secondary school experiences in which they were passive recipients rather than active participants in the learning process. Furthermore, we knew that while they were bright, the intellectual skills, abilities and the strategies students need to draw upon to successfully learn in our course, and at college in general, were not likely to be adequate.17 Some may have poor reading, listening, or note-taking skills; others may have never experienced more sophisticated levels of learning such as analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Consequently, the course needed to focus on the process of learning as much as on the content to assure that these novice learners become more expert learners who would continue to learn both in and beyond this course.13,14,18 Our students are also diverse (principle # 7) in a number of ways (e.g., different learning styles; a wide range of prerequisite knowledge and skills; different background and interests; and a variety of personalities, for example, from introverted to extroverted). While this diversity makes teaching interesting, it also makes it very challenging. We needed to be sure that students would approach us if they needed help or had questions (principle # 1), which is particularly difficult for those students who are simply not used to needing, and therefore asking for, help! We have also observed that the characteristics of our entering first-year students have changed over the years,19 having now less certainty about goals and majors, less exposure to hands-on activities, and greater computer skills. Therefore, we wanted to expose first-year students to a variety of engineering topics and provide them with hands-on experience in the homework and laboratory. April 1997

Table 1. Research -training analogy: steps in planning a research project and a course.

Table 2. Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. We expected that our students would be excited at the prospect of experiencing real engineering in their first year, and that this would result in a high level of motivation and thus more effective learning.20 Since the new curriculum requires that each first-year student take two introductory engineering courses, we knew some students would be taking Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering because of their planned major, while others would be fulfilling a requirement or broadening their perspective/understanding of engineering. To create and enhance motivation, we wanted to share the excitement of the field through demonstrations and provide students with some hands-on experience in mechanical engineering. B. What Were Our Major Objectives? We wanted students to be able to use the knowledge and skills they learned in our course for future courses, both in and out of mechanical engineering, and we wanted students to begin thinking of themselves as future engineers. More specifically, we hoped that, by the end of the course, students would be able to: April 1997

1. Content • apply basic mechanical engineering principles in an integrated manner to simple but real-world mechanical analysis and synthesis problems, therefore linking theory with physical devices; • build on concepts taught in physics courses (e.g., conservation of energy, kinematics, Newton’s laws) and apply them to mechanical engineering devices/ applications; • develop an intuitive sense of units (e.g., Newton, kg, g, meter, Pascal, Watt) and of orders of magnitude (e.g., 10E-9 to 10E+15); • define and give examples of engineering terms, such as: stress, strain, work, energy, free body diagram, moments, entropy, thermal efficiency, streamlines, viscosity, drag, thrust; 2. General Skills • think creatively and critically about how to solve openended problems; • develop or enhance learning skills specific to engineering; • identify the advantages and challenges of teamwork; • use simple and systematic problem-solving techniques; 3. Career/Professional Socialization • describe the scope of mechanical engineering; • understand the foundation and fundamental concepts of Mechanical Engineering in a connected way and have a sense of what they will learn in their future courses and the interrelation among different courses; and • interact with other engineering students and engineering professors during the first-year. Stating these objectives in terms of what students should be able to do if they successfully complete the course enabled us, and the Journal of Engineering Education 175

students, to observe and measure their progress more easily. Some of these goals are implicit, but we made them more explicit, and some are easier to evaluate than others. We had high expectations for our students (principle #6), we communicated them clearly, and we provided many opportunities for students to receive help as they worked toward accomplishing course goals. C. Given Time and Resource Constraints, What Should the Scope and Content of the Course Be? The Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering course introduces students to the two branches of mechanical engineering, movement and energy. The total number of lectures recommended by the department’s ad hoc committee is slightly more than the actual number of lectures in a semester, so the professor must use his/her discretion to reduce the number of lectures on some topics; however, all topics that future mechanical engineering courses build on must be covered with a minimum required content. Given who our students were and our goals for the course, and determined not to fall into the “coverage trap,” we decided that there was basic material which every student in the course should master, recommended material which students seeking a thorough knowledge of the subject should master, and optional material intended for those students with special interests who want to learn more than what is in the course.21 For the benefit of those students considering Mechanical Engineering as a major, we sought to include representative material to provide students with a broad perspective of the field. Therefore, in this introductory course we lay out the fundamental principles and the foundation for future courses in a coherent, integrated way, so students will be familiar with the basic concepts and how the subjects interrelate when they learn these subjects in more detail in later years. Since the expected course enrollment was eighty to ninety students, we determined that the format would include three fiftyminute lectures, one two-hour recitation (with groups of at most 30 students) per week, and bi-weekly labs. Recently, we added optional tutoring sessions, twice a week, for a total of four hours, in which junior and senior mechanical engineering students are available on a one-to-one basis to respond to the need of the students (i.e. clarify concepts, work practice problems, discuss projects). In addition to academic support, first-year students have the opportunity to interact with upper class students in mechanical engineering. Topics to include in the course, recommended by an ad hoc committee of mechanical engineering faculty, are given below along with the number of lectures shown in parenthesis: 1. Movement (28) • Forces and Static Equilibrium (3) • Stress and Strain (2-4) • Energy Storage, Dissipation and Conversion (1) • Rotational Systems and Gearing (2-3) • Motors and Generators (0-2) • Kinematics and Mechanisms (3-4) • Electrical Devices and Circuits (0-3) • Measurement and Feedback (1-2) • Fluid Statics and Dynamics: Pascal’s law, hydraulic machines, hydrostatic paradox, manometer, buoyancy and Archimedes’ principle; Bernoulli’s equation, mass conservation and viscosity; Turbomachinary: pumps, gas turbines and jet engines; Lift, Drag, and Thrust (4-8) • Principles of Design and Manufacturing (2-3) 176

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2. Energy (17) • Mechanical and Thermal Energy, Heat and Work (3-5) • First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, Internal Energy, Reversibility and Entropy (4-6) • Thermal Energy Conversion Systems: turbines for aircraft propulsion and for thermal power plants for electricity generation (1) • Engineering Cycles, Heat Engines, Heat Pumps, Refrigerators, Internal Combustion Engines and Otto Cycle (2-4) • Air Pollution and Environmental Issues Related to Mechanical Engineering: automobile and power plant pollution, photochemical smog, life cycle analysis, green design, and global warming (1-4) • Mechanisms of Heat Transfer: conduction, radiation and convection (3-5) 3) Ethics and Professional Responsibility (2) D. What Learning Experiences Should We Develop to Achieve Our Objectives? Many studies on learning indicate that students learn by doing (principle #3). We need to provide them with a body of information, through reading assignments and lectures, which they can use to solve problems, create mechanisms, and work on projects. The more practice students receive in using what they learn, the more likely they will retain that information for future use.13,14,18,22,23 Consequently, the course consists of lectures, recitations, reading assignments, hands-on individual projects, homework problems, group projects, and opportunities for individual tutoring. The recitations and labs provide some of the advantages of small classes, for example more individual attention and more opportunities for student interaction with the instructor, each other, the teaching assistants, and the upper class tutors. The goal of the lectures is to introduce theoretical concepts enhanced by classroom demonstrations, when applicable and available. Because the average student’s attention span is between ten and twenty minutes,24,25 these demonstrations also help to recapture students’ interest as does changing the pace of the lecture by asking questions and providing vivid (and live) examples to elaborate concepts. The goal of the reading assignments is similar, although we have not found a suitable book for the course that covers all the topics within an integrated structure. Instead, we carefully prepare our lecture notes to post in the library, use handouts heavily, and require students to use reference books such as Marks’ Standard Handbook of Mechanical Engineering,26 Mechanical Engineering Reference Manual27 and The Way Things Work.28 The latter is a particularly useful and entertaining reference book for those students who would benefit from acquiring a visual understanding of how a mechanical machine works and how its moving parts are interconnected, before describing and analyzing the principles that govern its actions. Since Fall ’95, we have included in this first-year course wellplanned visits to mechanical engineering research laboratories, and students are required to attend two out of eight visits. These activities provide students with an opportunity to learn about on-going research projects and interact with mechanical engineering graduate students and faculty, other than those teaching the course. The weekly out-of-class activities provide students with the opportunity to apply and practice what they have learned. Weekly homework assignments include required problems to turn in for a grade, optional practice problems, challenging problems for extra April 1997

credit points, and one hands-on mini-project which illustrates and applies the basic concepts taught in the lectures. The hands-on projects consist of both weekly individual mini projects and group integrated projects per semester. The group projects build on the outcome from the individual mini-projects with the objective of encouraging collaboration among students (principle #2) and crossfertilization of ideas.1,3,14,18 We believe this experience is extremely important for students, especially because a majority of engineering problems require an interdisciplinary approach, and their solutions require interdisciplinary teams of people who can work together, aided by tools that support their analysis.6 The inability to share knowledge, information, and tools among individuals has been recognized as one of the largest obstacles to integrated design,29 and research is just beginning to address this issue. We carefully designed, planned and tested the weekly hands-on mini-projects so that either these would be part of the group integrated project or the knowledge students acquire in the weekly projects would be readily applied to the group project. The group project begins with conceptualization, proceeds with the analysis of candidate designs, and culminates with the construction and testing of a prototype. Examples of group projects consist of building a model steam engine fueled with solid combustible pellets, and designing, analyzing and assembling the energy conversion mechanisms to: a) drive an electrical generator to light a bulb, and b) drive

a mobile vehicle. The mini-projects corresponding to the group projects of designing a steam-powered electricity generator and a steam-powered car are listed in Table 3, and pictures of students’ models are depicted in Figure 1. These systems that freshmen design and build demonstrate how technical devices exploit engineering principles and illustrate basic concepts taught in the lectures such as energy conversion, thermal efficiency, calorific value of fossil fuels and their associated environmental concerns, alternative fuels, laws of thermodynamics, heat transfer, torque conversion and associated rpm ratio, conversion from linear to rotational motion, as well as gear, chain and pulley transmission mechanisms. In the weekly mini-projects and hands-on assignments, each student experiments with her/his own miniature steam engine provided by Jensen Manufacturing Company Inc.,30 designs and calibrates several subsystems employed by the steam-powered system (e.g., torsional spring dynamometer, motor-driven circuit to use either as a tachometer or as an electrical generator), assembles and analyzes mechanical parts (e.g., gears, pulleys, chain transmissions, belts, levers, cams, cranks, linkages, springs, shafts, couplings and bearings—selected from Meccano sets), performs measurements (e.g., torque, rpm, power and fuel consumption rate) and estimates efficiencies by applying the fundamental principles and methods of analysis introduced in the lectures.

1a.

1b.

Figure 1. Steam-powered engines driving a: a) generator and b) mobile vehicle.

Table 3. Subsystems - Mini-projects related to the group projects of designing a steam-powered electricity generator and a steam-powered car. April 1997

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For the group projects, teams of four students analyze and evaluate the various subsystems designed and built by each team member. The team selects and improves, if necessary, the subsystems to be included in the integrated project such as the steam-powered car. At the completion of the steam-powered car project, there is a competition among teams of students for the most efficient car that drives the longest distance with a given amount of fuel. Pictures of the competition are shown in Figure 2. In designing the weekly and term projects, we tried to assure that: • projects would not be frustrating to students in terms of time and complexity; • projects would be closely mapped to course objectives, be enlightening to students, illustrate and reinforce concepts taught in the lectures, and be pre-tested by faculty and/or teaching assistants before they are assigned to insure previous tenets; and • projects would encourage student-faculty interactions, active learning, and cooperation among students.

Preparing a project-oriented hands-on course and requiring students to construct and test prototypes are time- and resource-intensive for both faculty and students. However, students learn best by doing, and students’ first-hand experience from concept through theoretical analysis to assembling and physical realization of their projects (despite how simple they are) is extremely valuable. E. What Type of Feedback and Evaluation Should be Given, How Much, and When? Providing a lot of opportunity for students to apply and practice what they have learned meant we had to assure that students received prompt evaluation and effective feedback. This enabled students and us to assess what they had learned and mastered and where they needed better understanding or more practice and why (principle #4). Timeliness is important—grading quizzes, discussing quiz solutions, and posting homework solutions soon after the fact enables students, with the problems fresh in their minds, to understand where they went wrong and why.31 We carefully planned the amount and type of feedback we would pro-

Figure 2. Pictures taken during the steam-powered car competition. 178

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vide, and we mapped our evaluation instruments (exams, quizzes, projects) to course objectives to assure that we were testing what we were teaching.

IV. IMPLEMENTATION A. Accommodating Audience Because many students are novice learners when they first come to college, we try to be very explicit throughout the course. We systematically begin each lecture with a quick review of the previous lecture and a brief preview of the current one, to place the information in context and provide links/connections to previous, and sometimes future, material which students often do not make themselves. We also attempt, when possible, to explain concepts in several different ways so that students could have a visual physical representation, a mathematical representation, and a verbal description and explanation. This seeming redundancy is important for learning and assures that teachers get to a larger number of the diverse learners represented in any class.32 Within lectures, we try to briefly summarize main points, and we end lectures with quick summaries of the session. We are careful about what we write on the chalkboard or put on overhead transparencies since students usually determine that the most important information is what instructors record. We strive to use pedagogical and motivational principles which appeal to a diverse population so that we do not inadvertently exclude anyone. For example, we teach knowledge in context and through real-life examples which students can identify with or visualize; we provide experiential learning so that students can experience trial and error; we allow for extended periods of observation and testing for the projects; and we insist that students apply theoretical material learned. These factors have been cited by numerous authors as necessary for attracting and retaining female and minority students.33,34 B. Adapting to Freshmen Student Development We try to provide enough and diverse learning experiences and emphasize their value so that students understand the importance of reading the assigned material, coming to class, completing the assignments on time, doing extra problems if necessary, and asking for help when the situation warrants it (principle #5). To ensure that students attend class, we purposely created a structure to motivate them. We lecture on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and on each of these days students need either to pick up or turn in homework assignments or take a quiz; on Mondays, we return their graded homework which they have to review for the quiz on Wednesday; on Wednesdays, we administer a 15-minute quiz; and on Fridays, we return the graded quiz, collect the homework assignment, and hand out the new homework assignment. The recitations are scheduled on Thursdays, the day before the homework is due, so that students can work on the homework and bring questions they may have to the recitations. Finally, the instructor holds office hours on Wednesdays and the teaching assistants on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Research on educational psychology has shown that perceived self-efficacy is essential for students to achieve good performance and persistence in any field including science, mathematics, and engineering.35 Perceived self-efficacy is developed through accomApril 1997

plishments, through observing others like ourselves perform and succeed, through freedom from anxiety with respect to learning, and through persuasion and support. Therefore, we attempt to present class material and create assignments in a way that is not intimidating, yet challenging, so students can be confident that by working hard, by dedicating time on task, and by seeking help when necessary, they can master the subjects introduced in class. C. Providing Effective Feedback We administer weekly quizzes and assign weekly homework so that students have the opportunity to practice new skills and/or apply new material, thus enabling them and us to closely monitor their learning. We provide frequent, timely, and prescriptive feedback on quizzes and homework assignments to help students understand not only where they went wrong but why. We return graded quizzes during the class after we administer them and briefly discuss solutions during that class. We post solutions to the homework problems the same day they are due. We are careful that our solution sets or explanations are thorough, because often experts in a field skip or combine steps which are second nature to them.36 Therefore, teaching assistants and tutors review and suggest revisions to the written solutions before we distribute them to students. D. Utilizing Learning Activities We created classroom demonstrations and adapted laboratory experiments for the first-year audience to keep them interested and motivated. The demonstrations in the classroom include, for example, the operation of a four-stroke gasoline engine, drag and viscous effects, balancing moments and forces, gyroscopic effects, four-bar linkage mechanisms, tensile test of rubber bands and creep of solder. The laboratory experiments include tensile tests, two-stage air compressor, ramjet, steam turbine, open channel flow with hydraulic jump, and infrared temperature equipment. We also include a visit to a steam generation plant, which provides steam for the Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh Medical Center heating systems and is located within walking distance of our campus. The students have an opportunity to observe the operation of coal- and gas-fired industrial boilers and the water treatment plant. We also created hands-on assignments and term projects in which students apply the principles taught in the lectures to physical prototypes so that they actually experience the application of concepts and principles which often appear abstract. Because of the group projects, we need to make sure that students function well in groups; many of them have never worked in groups on educational projects before. We include activities in which students have the opportunity to explore group dynamics and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, students learn through their own experience (by practicing, not just reading and talking!) about the advantages of team efforts, the potential problems surrounding group dynamics, the importance of effective communication skills, the necessity of effective planning, the constraints of tight time schedules and their impact on project activities, the responsibilities of individuals and groups within a project team, and the value of different talents and skills. We also talk explicitly with them about both the advantages and challenges of working in teams.

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V. EVALUATION: FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE We perform several formative evaluations early in the semester to find out which elements of the course are helping and hindering students’ learning and use this information to make changes as the course progresses and in future semesters. We administer an early course evaluation a few weeks into the course and ask students the following four questions: • What are the strongest features of this course and of the instructor; in other words, what contributes most to your learning? • What specific suggestions do you have for changes that would improve the course? • Do you think you have adequate background to be successful in this course? If yes, what do you think prepared you to be successful in this course (i.e. strong calculus or physics background? effective study skills? effective problem solving strategies?) If no, what type of background or preparation would have helped you? • Is the pace of the course too fast, just right, or too slow? We also asked the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence to observe classes several times during each semester to provide feedback and talk with students in focus groups to gather further and more detailed information on the course, its strengths and weaknesses. Informal, luncheon-type activities were organized which provided open-ended feedback so that there is no bias in feedback provided by students when specific questions are asked. This information was shared and discussed with the instructors and changes were made the next time the course was taught. Finally, the weekly quizzes helped us to determine if there were concepts or theories which we had not taught effectively (e.g. if most of the class could not solve a particular type of problem). All courses at Carnegie Mellon are also evaluated by students each semester and the results are published both on-line and in hard copy. These faculty and course evaluations provide one indication of student satisfaction. While it may be too soon to determine whether these first-year engineering courses accomplish all the objectives pursued, statistics indicate that since the introduction of the new first-year curriculum in the fall of 1991, the retention of engineering first-year students to sophomores increased from 79.2% to 80.1% for the 1991 cohort of entering students, to 82.5% for the 1992 cohort, and to 86.3% for the 1993 cohort.37 Interviews with exiting students in the spring of 1995—the first generation of students with first-year introductory engineering courses—indicate that the first-year courses have had positive effects on students’ perceptions of their understanding of engineering by the end of the first-year,37 reducing students’ attrition from first-year to sophomore years, generating enthusiasm for doing engineering in the first-year, enhancing interactions between first-year students and engineering faculty, and creating good work habits.

VI. CONCLUSION: TENETS FOR DESIGNING AND TEACHING FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING COURSES Our experience in developing and teaching this course for eleven semesters, and the experiences at other universities that offer first180

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year engineering courses, supports the cognitive research on learning. Based on our experience, we propose the following seven tenets: • Actively engaging students in a course is vital to learning: we provided opportunities for interaction during lectures and outside of class, used demonstrations and hands-on projects to stimulate students’ interest, and provided a lot of opportunity for practice because time on task enhances learning. • Frequent, prompt, and constructive feedback is an important part of the learning process: we assured timely return of quizzes and homework assignments and adequate feedback on individual papers, with thorough solution sets and inclass discussion of common errors. • Effective collaboration is an important component of engineering and integrated design: we created project assignments which required teamwork and explicitly discussed with students the advantages and difficulties of working in groups. • Clearly communicating expectations to students is important for their learning: we carefully defined the objectives for the course and shared them with students. • Students are more motivated to learn when they believe the instructor cares about them and their learning: we tried to learn students’ names, we encouraged them to come to office hours, and we arrived to class a few minutes early to chat with students. • Addressing a diverse audience, a variety of learning styles and, particularly, a broad range of educational objectives and backgrounds is important for reaching out all first-year students: we used different pedagogical activities to address the broad spectrum of learners. • Carefully coordinating components of the course so that activities and assessments reflect objectives, are integrated and connected, and are at an appropriate level for the audience is vital to learning: we mapped our activities and assessments and assured that students understood the relationships among lectures, labs, projects, homework problems, and site visits. We believe that students’ learning and our teaching require continuous monitoring, revision and improvement. We gain experience with each new first-year course we teach and, based on feedback from both formative evaluation like those mentioned above and summative evaluation like end-of-the-semester student evaluations and subsequent performance in other courses, we modify, refine and suggest further developments for the course. Once we are reasonably confident that the course objectives, scope, learning experiences and type and amount of feedback are appropriate and effective, more effort and time can be invested in creating new course projects, constructing new classroom demonstrations, and improving the course’s relationship with subsequent mechanical engineering courses which build on the freshman course material.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge Paul Christiano for his vision in requiring each engineering department to develop a freshman engineering course, ad hoc committees in the Department of Mechanical Engineering for brainstorming ideas during the course April 1997

design, Robert Sturges for developing part of this course, Rea Freeland for her careful reading and comments on this manuscript, and students, teaching assistants and colleagues for their many contributions to improving this first-year engineering course.

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