After the positive experience of having freshmen work with the seniors, students and faculty decided to continue the experience with the addition of a sophomore design course. This was started in the Fall of 1994 with a one hour pass/fail elective. In this class the students formed teams and did several in-class team exercises. The most successful was a tower building contest using the rules established by Kim Aaron for a similar contest held at the NASA/USRA meeting at Pasadena in June of 1994. It includes economic as well as technical requirements. We also do some team problems developed by John McMasters for the Boeing summer intern program and the introductory engineering course he has taught at the University of Washington. John has been very willing to share his ideas with us.
Several other activities were team oriented. The students were required to go on a video scavenger hunt (Dr. Mark Anderson's idea) to interview someone with a connection to aerospace or ocean engineering about their experiences in aerospace or ocean engineering, producing a ten minute video. Although we had intended to get insight into the engineering aspects, the students mainly interviewed pilots. Although this is a key part of aviation, we will try to have them broaden the topics in the future. We expect to save these tapes and show selected ones to our classes in the future. Eventually, we expect to have a useful library. Other aspects of the course included a trip to the campus composite manufacturing plant and the library to see how to obtain information. They were also required to attend one of the senior design class final fall presentations.
Our experience with this class to date is that having sophomores in the class by themselves is not nearly as effective as mixed classes. In addition, we are struggling slightly to develop meaningful design exercises, wherein students can listen to a lecture for an hour on a key aspect of aerospace (and ocean) engineering, and then spend an hour working as a team to solve a design problem posed at the end of the lecture. Our experience is that development of effective hands-on design exercises at the right level is both more important than we realized, and more difficult than we expected.