Design Principles For Freshman/Sophomore Engineering And Technology Students

Through Gateway, we developed at Cooper Union a very successful course which has now been institutionalized and is being taught for the fifth year in a row: EID 103 – Principles of Design. The course is presented at Cooper Union at the freshman/sophomore level for between 12 and 20 students each year, and at the New York City Technical College in the ElectroMechanical Engineering Technology Department. The first part of the course consists of learning the principles of design through reverse engineering. Working in small teams, students take apart and put back together such items as a floppy disk drive, a toy robot arm, and a model engine. As they go about their work, they sketch, take notes, and answer specific questions to tease out the ideas behind the form and the embodiment of the design. They learn about Functional Requirements, design parameters and their relations, choice of material, economy, and mechanisms before they attempt to design a simple product of their choice, which may vary from a bicycle rack to a CD holder, a better mudguard for a bike, or a more efficient dish rack. To show them the importance of the relation of physics, mathematics, engineering science, materials, experiment design, synthesis, and analysis, we have prepared for them a CD-ROM on Leonardo da Vinci and his flying machine, where we show that, in spite of all his genius, Leonardo could not succeed. It is an interesting, amusing, yet sobering lesson. Notwithstanding the lesson, the interest of students in Leonardo's machines has led to the development of a very successful mini-exhibition of models of some of his flying machines, which has been featured at the New York City Technical College library and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company headquarters, and reported on the local TV news and in the Press (NY Post). This article presents details about course content, organization, and assessment, as well as the resulting public exhibition of Leonardo's non-flying machines.