Full Body Contact Statics And Other Freshman Engineering Experiences

Hundreds of papers presented at ASEE meetings have described introduction to engineering courses and projects. This paper provides actual instructional materials for three inexpensive active-learning activities that can be performed by first-semester freshmen to introduce them to engineering and motivate them to learn a suite of computer applications. Two of them are in-class laboratory experiments that provide data to analyze with MathCAD or Excel. The third activity is a team design project that is best performed around Halloween. Student feedback indicates that these simple hands-on activities effectively introduce students to fundamental engineering concepts.