THE MELTING POT APPROACH TO SENIOR DESIGN

Senior design courses in engineering programs, in addition to being required for accreditation, are ideal vehicles with which to incorporate and integrate all of the knowledge and skills that students have developed in their academic careers as well as in their extra-curricular lives. However, in spite of the tremendous opportunities to assimilate and develop engineering knowledge and practice, many engineering faculty shy away from teaching these courses, concerned that they have neither the experience nor the time to devote to supervise design projects successfully. This paper provides examples, experiences, perspectives and principles that engineering faculty can use to make their design courses more successful and meaningful, for not only the students but for the instructors as well. We hope to spark the imagination of design instructors to develop more meaningful and interesting projects and to discover the supreme joy there is in teaching design courses.