Development of an Undergraduate Engineering Research Course

This paper presents an effort to develop an undergraduate research course to produce an alternative to a mandatory internship course, Engineering Practice taken by all majors including manufacturing engineering. The new course is labeled as Engineering Research Projects. However, with the growing enrollments and especially in international students, internship placement has become a challenge. The new Engineering Research Projects course will reduce the pressure on Engineering Practice distributing the enrollment in between both courses. It will also accommodate the growing research needs of the department while engaging students in activities that prepare them for graduate study. The author have been utilizing the internal research projects from the last 10 years as a reference in designing this course. These projects happened under the umbrella of the Engineering Practice course. The new course will be a better match in terms of its requirements. Engineering Practice requires at least 150 hours of engineering work that may include design, analysis, development, maintenance, service, and even technical sales. Each student in the Engineering Practice course deliver a PPT presentation after completing the experience, turn in a final report or a portfolio covering the work done along with a weekly log and journal that describes the activities. Students also complete a student survey to reflect on their experience and are graded by their work supervisors. The new course will also include the minimum hours requirement, weekly journals and logs along with the PPT Presentation. The main difference will be that the students are required to produce scholarly works including conference papers and trade journal articles. Scholarly works of appropriate quality may also be submitted to scientific journals. The completion and submission of these works will be the requirement, not the acceptance. The course will draw its students from internal and collaborative research projects at the institution along with students conducting research at other local institutions and through NSF REU and other similar programs. The number of students engaging research have been growing rapidly along with graduate study. Students will be utilizing research databases such as Scopus, Proquest, and Google Scholar, be guided on research methods and scholarly work production. Intellectual Property information and Google Patent will also be an important part of the course if the students develop an original product or process. This course will not replace the interdisciplinary capstone course, Integrated Engineering Design but will be a good complement to it along with Engineering Practice. This paper includes a literature review on including research in undergraduate curriculum, the syllabus including ABET student learning outcomes, and relate to the existing and previous research work done at the institution as case studies.