Freshmen Engineering Majors Gets Pumped Up To Design Human Powered Water Pump At University Of Maryland Eastern Shore

Engineering Criteria 2000 of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) is encouraging engineering programs to emphasize on both soft and technical skills in the engineering curriculum. Engineering graduates of the new millennium will not only have to be proficient in mathematics and sciences but will also have to learn to work well in teams to design and develop products to meet specified needs. University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES) offers an ABET accredited engineering program in collaboration with University of Maryland College Park(UMCP). In response to the new criteria UMCP developed a team based design course for the freshman engineering majors. The course has been adopted with suitable modifications at UMES. The course is designed to introduce field of engineering and engineering design process to freshman engineering majors so as to enable them to realize how individual courses in an engineering curricula are integrated together under a common objective. In this paper we describe the highlights of design efforts by the students in developing human powered water pumps with specified head and flow rate in the spring and fall semesters of year 2001. The project outcomes are elaborated from the perspective of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. The assessment techniques and their strengths and weaknesses are also discussed.