A first-year introduction to engineering management design course

Abstract

A two-semester first-year undergraduate course is offered as the introductory course in the engineering management major at Clarkson University. The course is open only to engineering management majors and has broad objectives that touch on many aspects of the major in an introductory fashion. It also touches several aspects of the ABET engineering criteria. The course is required of first-year students in the major. In the course students work in teams to perform two engineering designs. In the first semester the design is prescriptive and is used as a tool to teach and learn engineering design tools of Microsoft Excel, MathWorks MATLAB, and Autodesk Inventor, and the presentation tool Powerpoint. The students also learn basics of teaming, the engineering design process, the meaning of real world constraints, design for the environment, and ethics. The students present their designs in oral and written fashion at the end of the semester. In the second semester, the design process is opened up to the teams and a real-world design is undertaken. The design in the second semester involves a local real world client and incorporates performing the engineering design and learning the basic tools of project management, supply chain management, and operations management to prepare a management plan around the project design. The product and management plan are again presented orally and in a written document and presented to the real world client. Some of the designs from this second semester course have been adopted by the client in recent years.