Undergraduate students in Mechanical Engineering participate in various projects that exercise both individual and team-based problem solving while exploring the curriculum topics in creative ways.
ME 441 - Introduction to Engineering Design and Solid Modeling
This course begins with a tower building project that requires both an individual component and a team component. Students begin work on the tower individually and then are introduced to 2 or 3 teammates. A total of 60 minutes is allowed to choose the team's approach and to build the tower that is capable of supporting the class textbook for 5 seconds or more from the materials provided.
ME 627 - Dynamics
Students in class are required to work in groups (4-6 students/group) to design, and fabricate a Rube Goldberg machine (desktop) to demonstrate mechanical energy transformation. The machine can at least finish three steps of mechanical energy transformation. Mechanical experiments need to be designed to measure and calculate the characteristics of motion of particles and rigid bodies in this machine. The direct measurement will be compared with the analytical prediction. The differences between experiments and calculations need to be analyzed. Both oral presentation and demonstration (~6min), and a written report (~5-10 pages) need to be completed for each group.