Developing a Summer Bridge Course for Improving Retention in Engineering

This paper outlines the details of a summer bridge, project-based, cooperative, introduction to engineering pilot course developed and successfully implemented at Spelman College in an effort to increase the retention rate of students to be enrolled in its dual-degree engineering program. The course aims to expose incoming students of any STEM discipline to a broad array of practical and theoretical engineering principles for the purpose of helping students make informed decisions about pursuing engineering as a study major prior to the start of their freshman year. To satisfy this objective, the cross-disciplinary course that was developed is based on completing a software-driven, electro-mechanical engineering project that, at various times and to various extents, calls upon students to function in the capacity of an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a technician, a mathematician, a computer scientist, a researcher and a communicator of technical material. In so doing, the students gain insight about how engineers combine knowledge from these diverse disciplines to solve a real problem—in this case, constructing and characterizing a 2-DOF, servoed laser system used to trace arbitrary patterns against a wall. Using an "inverted curriculum" approach that by-passes the first two years of the classic engineering curriculum, the course immerses the students directly into an engineering design project in an attempt to capture, as closely as possible, the end-goal of engineering training while providing a window to the challenges and gratifications of engineering both in practice and in an R&D setting. It was observed that, far from having the feared effect of driving the students to disinterest, challenging the students with a difficult curriculum of technical concepts to be used to solve a non-trivial but well-defined and tangible problem elicited high interest and thoughtful evaluations and re-evaluations of engineering as a study major. Details of the course, which involves building a circuit from a schematic, developing code for a multi-core microcontroller, learning and applying the concept of pulsewidth-modulation to control servo motors and developing the required mathematical coordinate transformations to successfully control the orientation of the laser are discussed.