PI: Richard Goff, Associate Professor, Division of Engineering Fundamentals

Project Goals or Needs Addressed: "…we felt that the students were coming into school these days with very poor mechanical skills, but they had very good virtual skills, they were excellent with computers… but they have lost that skill that we developed when we were kids when we were working on our bikes and our cars… they weren’t doing so much of that anymore. So we were finding they were lacking in those areas, that was one of the goals: to increase their mechanical skill level. And the awareness of how things worked, with how various small devices worked such as drills or cameras, how did they actually work."
Project Grants and Expenditures: $20,000 (year 6), $25,000 (year 7), $9000 (year 8), faculty wages



Frith Freshmen Engineering Design Laboratory
(Web site)
 


This project instituted various hands-on laboratory activities for Freshmen taking the Engineering Fundamentals 1015 course. Since over 1200 Freshmen take this course, students could opt to self-select into the lab as part of their course. They were not required to do so. Project staff would like to give all 1200 Freshmen a hands-on laboratory experience, possibly by integrating such activities beyond EF 1015 into other classes such as the design graphics class.

Although this project is related to Succeed project ST 3-2 in terms of goals, it involves actual laboratory experiences, whereas project ST 3-2 involves students in hands-on manipulations during their actual class sessions. Every team of four freshmen were given a "McGuyver box… to build devices [as homework] and little gadgets to solve certain engineering problems." Students also undertake such activities as working with Lego kits and disassembling and reassembling Briggs and Stratton engines in the lab.