Linking Student Initiated Projects To Engineering Design Education

The engineering design process is paramount to the practice of engineering; hence, engineering programs have made increasing commitments to teaching design as part of design courses, particularly capstone design classes. In the engineering colleges of most universities, however, there exists a largely untapped resource for providing formalized design experience, that being the student-initiated design project. These design projects, oftentimes highly competitive in nature, are initiated and managed by student chapters of engineering societies as well as teams of students that form temporarily to meet a certain goal. Examples of such team projects include Solar Car, SAE Formula One Racing, and Concrete Canoe, to name but a few. These design projects can and do equip students with many of the abilities that industry desires in the new engineering graduate, such as ability to address a customer’s real needs, effective time management, experience with integrated product development/concurrent engineering, effective communication skills, thorough understanding of current design tools, and sense of the total business equation. These projects also provide the student with “hands-on” experience in “realworld” engineering problems and are often very interdisciplinary in nature. Unfortunately, because of their extra-curricular nature, it is often difficult to link them formally to educational goals or integrate them into the formal engineering design curricula.