Systematic Design of a First-Year
Mechanical Engineering Course at Carnegie
Mellon University
SUSAN A. AMBROSE
Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence
Carnegie Mellon University
CRISTINA H. AMON
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
ABSTRACT
Carnegie Mellon University offers a first-year course titled Funda-
mentals of Mechanical Engineering to introduce undergraduate
students to the discipline of mechanical engineering. The goals of
the course are to excite students about the field of mechanical engi-
neering early in their careers, introduce basic mechanical engineer-
ing concepts in an integrated way, provide a link to the basic
physics and mathematics courses, and present design and prob-
lem-solving skills as central engineering activities. These goals are
met through a combination of real-world engineering examples,
classroom demonstrations, and hands-on experience in assign-
ments and laboratories. Over the eleven semesters that this course
has been taught, teams of first-year students have designed and as-
sembled energy conversion mechanisms using miniature steam
engines and Meccano sets to drive a mobile vehicle or to generate
electricity for lighting a bulb. This paper describes the systematic
process used to design this course and emphasizes this process of
carefully integrating lectures with classroom demonstrations, lab-
oratory experiments and hands-on projects to encourage students’
active learning.
I. INTRODUCTION
A recent report by the committee on Engineering Design The-
ory and Methodology of the National Research Council empha-
sized the increasing need for more design and project-oriented ex-
periences in undergraduate engineering programs,1 in part due to
the scarcity of practical, hands-on experience in our nation’s pre-
college education. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and
Technology (ABET) has also increased and reinforced the design
requirements since the late seventies.2 As a response to these needs,
many colleges and universities have included hands-on projects in
engineering curricula and have developed capstone design courses
in an attempt to better prepare graduating engineers for addressing
practical engineering problems. These courses range in length from
part of a semester to one academic year, and in structure from indi-
vidual to group projects;3 they may involve engineering design,
April 1997
hands-on projects and prototype development, engineering design
studio, and engineering project management.4-6
However, most of these design courses are beyond the first-
year, after the student has chosen a specific engineering career.
Concern for attrition in engineering students has motivated
many engineering schools to revise their undergraduate curricula
and, particularly, to take a closer look at what students learn in their
first-year.7 In the early 1990s, many engineering programs started
offering project-based first-year courses,8-11 in addition to general
introduction-to-engineering courses focused only on technical con-
tent such as engineering graphics and computing. These courses
allow the integration of a variety of skills, hands-on experiences,
and disciplinary approaches as needed to understand and solve a de-
sign problem. Members of the ECSEL coalition, which includes
the University of Maryland, Howard University, and City College
of New York among others, created engineering design courses
which are integrated throughout the curriculum and start at the
first-year level, in an attempt to stimulate creativity and motivate
students who are attracted to engineering.9 Members of the SUC-
CEED Engineering Education Coalition introduced a first-year
studio course with hands-on engineering practice and multi-disci-
plinary design projects.10 To increase retention rates, some engi-
neering schools are converting introduction-to-engineering courses
into vital support programs that help students develop study skills,
generate enthusiasm for engineering, and instill a sense of member-
ship in the academic community.7 All of these courses are general
engineering first-year courses as opposed to discipline specific.
In 1990, the Engineering College at Carnegie Mellon commis-
sioned each of the six engineering departments to develop a do-
main-specific first-year introductory engineering course to be taught
every semester starting in Fall ‘91. Students are required to take two
of these courses—one each semester during their first-year. These
first-year engineering courses are 12-unit courses, which represent
the expected number of hours per week a student should spend on a
course. These 12 hours include both in-class and out of class time.
The first-year engineering courses correspond to about 30% of the
first-year course load. The Mechanical Engineering first-year
course combines three lectures and two-hour recitations per week
with laboratory experiments, classroom demonstrations, and
hands-on experience in the homework and laboratory. It includes
fundamental concepts, problem-solving skills, and real-world ex-
amples with which students are familiar as well as weekly hands-on
projects and design competition among teams of students.
II. BACKGROUND
Since the 1940s, the Carnegie Plan of Professional Education
has been a vital component of the educational objectives of the En-
Journal of Engineering Education 173
gineering College at Carnegie Mellon. The Carnegie Plan purports
to help each student acquire some skills especially important to en-
gineering education, including among others:
• a thorough and integrated understanding of fundamental
knowledge in the fields of a student’s major interest and the
ability to apply this knowledge to the formulation and solu-
tion of real problems;
• a genuine competence in the orderly way of thinking which
professional engineers have always used in reaching sound,
creative conclusions: to the end that after graduation the stu-
dent can, by such thinking, reach decisions in higher profes-
sional work and as a citizen;
• an ability to continue to learn with scholarly orderliness so
that after graduation the student will be able to grow in wis-
dom and keep abreast of the changing knowledge and prob-
lems of the profession and the society in which he or she
lives;
• the philosophical outlook, breadth of knowledge, and sense
of values which will increase the student’s understanding and
enjoyment of life and enable him or her to recognize and deal
effectively with the human, economic, and social aspects of
professional problems; and
• the ability to communicate ideas to others.
In keeping with this tradition, the Engineering College at
Carnegie Mellon made significant changes in the curriculum sever-
al years ago in response to the changing and increasing demands on
engineering graduates. In an attempt to assure that we graduate
students who meet the needs of a changing society and who will be-
come life-long learners, the College of Engineering:
• created first-year introductory engineering courses in each of
the six engineering departments to expose students to engi-
neering disciplines and methodologies early in their academ-
ic careers so that they can make an informed decision about
which engineering program to enroll in by the end of the
first-year;
• retained the liberal arts requirements which make up approx-
imately 20 % of the student’s program to assure that our en-
gineering graduates are well rounded individuals;
• reduced the course load in the first-year from five courses to
four so that students can concentrate on learning fewer sub-
jects well;
• made the engineering curriculum more flexible by increasing
the number of technical and free elective courses within each
major to permit greater diversity in student endeavors; stu-
dents can then appreciate the breadth of career opportunities
that await them and can pursue directions that are more ap-
pealing to their interests, career goals and talents;
• instituted designated minors within the college of engineer-
ing and other colleges, such as in Design, Manufacturing
Engineering, Environmental Engineering, and Biomedical
Engineering to promote flexibility and diversity among stu-
dents; and
• developed multi-disciplinary, project-oriented courses that
promote students’ creativity and encourage team work and
hands-on experience. For example, the Wearable Comput-
ers Design course created by the Engineering Design Re-
search Center (EDRC) at Carnegie Mellon which integrates
research and education through industry-sponsored design
projects, producing a new generation of engineering gradu-
174 Journal of Engineering Education
ates with experience in design theory, design practice, and
team work .5,6
The most dramatic of these changes was the creation of first-
year introductory engineering courses—one in each of the six de-
partments—taught for the first time in the Fall of 1991. The new
curriculum requires that students take two of these courses—one
each semester during their first-year. These courses expose students
to engineering from the onset, enabling them to gain breadth across
disciplines, relate basic first-year physics and mathematics courses
to engineering subjects, begin to acquire problem-solving skills, and
become acquainted with major disciplines before they must choose
a major at the end of their first-year.12,13,14 This paper focuses on the
development, implementation and evaluation of the introductory
course in mechanical engineering and describes the design princi-
ples we explicitly applied in creating this course.
III. THE DEVELOPMENT PHASE
We began the development phase of the Fundamentals of Me-
chanical Engineering course by considering five factors—audi-
ence, objectives, scope and content, learning activities, and feed-
back. These factors are identified by Davidson and Ambroses’s
Research-Teaching Analogy15 shown in Table 1 and are partially
addressed by the American Association for Higher Education’s16
Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education
noted in Table 2.
A. Who Was Our Audience and How Would That Impact the Course?
We knew that our students would be bright, at the top of their
high-school class, and high-score achievers on measures like SATs.
However, we also knew that many of them came from secondary
school experiences in which they were passive recipients rather than
active participants in the learning process. Furthermore, we knew
that while they were bright, the intellectual skills, abilities and the
strategies students need to draw upon to successfully learn in our
course, and at college in general, were not likely to be adequate.17
Some may have poor reading, listening, or note-taking skills; others
may have never experienced more sophisticated levels of learning
such as analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Consequently, the course
needed to focus on the process of learning as much as on the con-
tent to assure that these novice learners become more expert learn-
ers who would continue to learn both in and beyond this
course.13,14,18
Our students are also diverse (principle # 7) in a number of ways
(e.g., different learning styles; a wide range of prerequisite knowl-
edge and skills; different background and interests; and a variety of
personalities, for example, from introverted to extroverted). While
this diversity makes teaching interesting, it also makes it very chal-
lenging. We needed to be sure that students would approach us if
they needed help or had questions (principle # 1), which is particu-
larly difficult for those students who are simply not used to needing,
and therefore asking for, help! We have also observed that the char-
acteristics of our entering first-year students have changed over the
years,19 having now less certainty about goals and majors, less expo-
sure to hands-on activities, and greater computer skills. Therefore,
we wanted to expose first-year students to a variety of engineering
topics and provide them with hands-on experience in the home-
work and laboratory.
April 1997
 Table 1. Research -training analogy: steps in planning a research project and a course.
Table 2. Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate
education.
We expected that our students would be excited at the
prospect of experiencing real engineering in their first year, and
that this would result in a high level of motivation and thus more
effective learning.20 Since the new curriculum requires that each
first-year student take two introductory engineering courses, we
knew some students would be taking Fundamentals of Mechani-
cal Engineering because of their planned major, while others
would be fulfilling a requirement or broadening their perspec-
tive/understanding of engineering. To create and enhance moti-
vation, we wanted to share the excitement of the field through
demonstrations and provide students with some hands-on experi-
ence in mechanical engineering.
B. What Were Our Major Objectives?
We wanted students to be able to use the knowledge and skills
they learned in our course for future courses, both in and out of me-
chanical engineering, and we wanted students to begin thinking of
themselves as future engineers. More specifically, we hoped that, by
the end of the course, students would be able to:
April 1997
1. Content
• apply basic mechanical engineering principles in an integrat-
ed manner to simple but real-world mechanical analysis and
synthesis problems, therefore linking theory with physical
devices;
• build on concepts taught in physics courses (e.g., conserva-
tion of energy, kinematics, Newton’s laws) and apply them to
mechanical engineering devices/ applications;
• develop an intuitive sense of units (e.g., Newton, kg, g,
meter, Pascal, Watt) and of orders of magnitude (e.g., 10E-9
to 10E+15);
• define and give examples of engineering terms, such as:
stress, strain, work, energy, free body diagram, moments, en-
tropy, thermal efficiency, streamlines, viscosity, drag, thrust;
2. General Skills
• think creatively and critically about how to solve open-
ended problems;
• develop or enhance learning skills specific to engineering;
• identify the advantages and challenges of teamwork;
• use simple and systematic problem-solving techniques;
3. Career/Professional Socialization
• describe the scope of mechanical engineering;
• understand the foundation and fundamental concepts of
Mechanical Engineering in a connected way and have a
sense of what they will learn in their future courses and the
interrelation among different courses; and
• interact with other engineering students and engineering
professors during the first-year.
Stating these objectives in terms of what students should be able
to do if they successfully complete the course enabled us, and the
Journal of Engineering Education 175
students, to observe and measure their progress more easily. Some
of these goals are implicit, but we made them more explicit, and
some are easier to evaluate than others. We had high expectations
for our students (principle #6), we communicated them clearly, and
we provided many opportunities for students to receive help as they
worked toward accomplishing course goals.
C. Given Time and Resource Constraints, What Should the Scope and
Content of the Course Be?
The Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering course intro-
duces students to the two branches of mechanical engineering,
movement and energy. The total number of lectures recommended
by the department’s ad hoc committee is slightly more than the ac-
tual number of lectures in a semester, so the professor must use
his/her discretion to reduce the number of lectures on some topics;
however, all topics that future mechanical engineering courses build
on must be covered with a minimum required content. Given who
our students were and our goals for the course, and determined not
to fall into the “coverage trap,” we decided that there was basic ma-
terial which every student in the course should master, recom-
mended material which students seeking a thorough knowledge of
the subject should master, and optional material intended for those
students with special interests who want to learn more than what is
in the course.21 For the benefit of those students considering Me-
chanical Engineering as a major, we sought to include representa-
tive material to provide students with a broad perspective of the
field. Therefore, in this introductory course we lay out the funda-
mental principles and the foundation for future courses in a coher-
ent, integrated way, so students will be familiar with the basic con-
cepts and how the subjects interrelate when they learn these
subjects in more detail in later years.
Since the expected course enrollment was eighty to ninety stu-
dents, we determined that the format would include three fifty-
minute lectures, one two-hour recitation (with groups of at most 30
students) per week, and bi-weekly labs. Recently, we added option-
al tutoring sessions, twice a week, for a total of four hours, in which
junior and senior mechanical engineering students are available on a
one-to-one basis to respond to the need of the students (i.e. clarify
concepts, work practice problems, discuss projects). In addition to
academic support, first-year students have the opportunity to inter-
act with upper class students in mechanical engineering. Topics to
include in the course, recommended by an ad hoc committee of
mechanical engineering faculty, are given below along with the
number of lectures shown in parenthesis:
1. Movement (28)
• Forces and Static Equilibrium (3)
• Stress and Strain (2-4)
• Energy Storage, Dissipation and Conversion (1)
• Rotational Systems and Gearing (2-3)
• Motors and Generators (0-2)
• Kinematics and Mechanisms (3-4)
• Electrical Devices and Circuits (0-3)
• Measurement and Feedback (1-2)
• Fluid Statics and Dynamics: Pascal’s law, hydraulic ma-
chines, hydrostatic paradox, manometer, buoyancy and
Archimedes’ principle; Bernoulli’s equation, mass conserva-
tion and viscosity; Turbomachinary: pumps, gas turbines and
jet engines; Lift, Drag, and Thrust (4-8)
• Principles of Design and Manufacturing (2-3)
176 Journal of Engineering Education
2. Energy (17)
• Mechanical and Thermal Energy, Heat and Work (3-5)
• First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, Internal Ener-
gy, Reversibility and Entropy (4-6)
• Thermal Energy Conversion Systems: turbines for aircraft
propulsion and for thermal power plants for electricity gen-
eration (1)
• Engineering Cycles, Heat Engines, Heat Pumps, Refrigera-
tors, Internal Combustion Engines and Otto Cycle (2-4)
• Air Pollution and Environmental Issues Related to Mechan-
ical Engineering: automobile and power plant pollution,
photochemical smog, life cycle analysis, green design, and
global warming (1-4)
• Mechanisms of Heat Transfer: conduction, radiation and
convection (3-5)
3) Ethics and Professional Responsibility (2)
D. What Learning Experiences Should We Develop to Achieve Our
Objectives?
Many studies on learning indicate that students learn by doing
(principle #3). We need to provide them with a body of informa-
tion, through reading assignments and lectures, which they can use
to solve problems, create mechanisms, and work on projects. The
more practice students receive in using what they learn, the more
likely they will retain that information for future use.13,14,18,22,23 Con-
sequently, the course consists of lectures, recitations, reading as-
signments, hands-on individual projects, homework problems,
group projects, and opportunities for individual tutoring. The
recitations and labs provide some of the advantages of small classes,
for example more individual attention and more opportunities for
student interaction with the instructor, each other, the teaching as-
sistants, and the upper class tutors.
The goal of the lectures is to introduce theoretical concepts en-
hanced by classroom demonstrations, when applicable and avail-
able. Because the average student’s attention span is between ten
and twenty minutes,24,25 these demonstrations also help to recapture
students’ interest as does changing the pace of the lecture by asking
questions and providing vivid (and live) examples to elaborate con-
cepts. The goal of the reading assignments is similar, although we
have not found a suitable book for the course that covers all the top-
ics within an integrated structure. Instead, we carefully prepare our
lecture notes to post in the library, use handouts heavily, and require
students to use reference books such as Marks’ Standard Handbook
of Mechanical Engineering,26 Mechanical Engineering Reference Man-
ual27 and The Way Things Work.28 The latter is a particularly useful
and entertaining reference book for those students who would ben-
efit from acquiring a visual understanding of how a mechanical ma-
chine works and how its moving parts are interconnected, before
describing and analyzing the principles that govern its actions.
Since Fall ’95, we have included in this first-year course well-
planned visits to mechanical engineering research laboratories, and
students are required to attend two out of eight visits. These activi-
ties provide students with an opportunity to learn about on-going
research projects and interact with mechanical engineering gradu-
ate students and faculty, other than those teaching the course.
The weekly out-of-class activities provide students with the op-
portunity to apply and practice what they have learned. Weekly
homework assignments include required problems to turn in for a
grade, optional practice problems, challenging problems for extra
April 1997
credit points, and one hands-on mini-project which illustrates and
applies the basic concepts taught in the lectures. The hands-on pro-
jects consist of both weekly individual mini projects and group inte-
grated projects per semester. The group projects build on the out-
come from the individual mini-projects with the objective of
encouraging collaboration among students (principle #2) and cross-
fertilization of ideas.1,3,14,18 We believe this experience is extremely
important for students, especially because a majority of engineering
problems require an interdisciplinary approach, and their solutions
require interdisciplinary teams of people who can work together,
aided by tools that support their analysis.6 The inability to share
knowledge, information, and tools among individuals has been rec-
ognized as one of the largest obstacles to integrated design,29 and re-
search is just beginning to address this issue.
We carefully designed, planned and tested the weekly hands-on
mini-projects so that either these would be part of the group inte-
grated project or the knowledge students acquire in the weekly pro-
jects would be readily applied to the group project. The group pro-
ject begins with conceptualization, proceeds with the analysis of
candidate designs, and culminates with the construction and test-
ing of a prototype. Examples of group projects consist of building a
model steam engine fueled with solid combustible pellets, and de-
signing, analyzing and assembling the energy conversion mecha-
nisms to: a) drive an electrical generator to light a bulb, and b) drive
1a.
Figure 1. Steam-powered engines driving a: a) generator and b) mobile vehicle.
Table 3. Subsystems - Mini-projects related to the group projects of designing a steam-powered electricity generator and a steam-pow-
ered car.
April 1997
a mobile vehicle. The mini-projects corresponding to the group
projects of designing a steam-powered electricity generator and a
steam-powered car are listed in Table 3, and pictures of students’
models are depicted in Figure 1.
These systems that freshmen design and build demonstrate how
technical devices exploit engineering principles and illustrate basic
concepts taught in the lectures such as energy conversion, thermal
efficiency, calorific value of fossil fuels and their associated environ-
mental concerns, alternative fuels, laws of thermodynamics, heat
transfer, torque conversion and associated rpm ratio, conversion
from linear to rotational motion, as well as gear, chain and pulley
transmission mechanisms.
In the weekly mini-projects and hands-on assignments, each
student experiments with her/his own miniature steam engine pro-
vided by Jensen Manufacturing Company Inc.,30 designs and cali-
brates several subsystems employed by the steam-powered system
(e.g., torsional spring dynamometer, motor-driven circuit to use ei-
ther as a tachometer or as an electrical generator), assembles and
analyzes mechanical parts (e.g., gears, pulleys, chain transmissions,
belts, levers, cams, cranks, linkages, springs, shafts, couplings and
bearings—selected from Meccano sets), performs measurements
(e.g., torque, rpm, power and fuel consumption rate) and estimates
efficiencies by applying the fundamental principles and methods of
analysis introduced in the lectures.
1b.
Journal of Engineering Education 177
 For the group projects, teams of four students analyze and evalu-
ate the various subsystems designed and built by each team mem-
ber. The team selects and improves, if necessary, the subsystems to
be included in the integrated project such as the steam-powered
car. At the completion of the steam-powered car project, there is a
competition among teams of students for the most efficient car that
drives the longest distance with a given amount of fuel. Pictures of
the competition are shown in Figure 2.
In designing the weekly and term projects, we tried to assure
that:
• projects would not be frustrating to students in terms of
time and complexity;
• projects would be closely mapped to course objectives, be en-
lightening to students, illustrate and reinforce concepts
taught in the lectures, and be pre-tested by faculty and/or
teaching assistants before they are assigned to insure previous
tenets; and
• projects would encourage student-faculty interactions, active
learning, and cooperation among students.
Figure 2. Pictures taken during the steam-powered car competition.
178 Journal of Engineering Education
Preparing a project-oriented hands-on course and requiring stu-
dents to construct and test prototypes are time- and resource-inten-
sive for both faculty and students. However, students learn best by
doing, and students’ first-hand experience from concept through
theoretical analysis to assembling and physical realization of their
projects (despite how simple they are) is extremely valuable.
E. What Type of Feedback and Evaluation Should be Given, How
Much, and When?
Providing a lot of opportunity for students to apply and prac-
tice what they have learned meant we had to assure that students
received prompt evaluation and effective feedback. This enabled
students and us to assess what they had learned and mastered and
where they needed better understanding or more practice and
why (principle #4). Timeliness is important—grading quizzes,
discussing quiz solutions, and posting homework solutions soon
after the fact enables students, with the problems fresh in their
minds, to understand where they went wrong and why.31 We
carefully planned the amount and type of feedback we would pro-
April 1997
vide, and we mapped our evaluation instruments (exams, quizzes,
projects) to course objectives to assure that we were testing what
we were teaching.
IV. IMPLEMENTATION
A. Accommodating Audience
Because many students are novice learners when they first come
to college, we try to be very explicit throughout the course. We sys-
tematically begin each lecture with a quick review of the previous
lecture and a brief preview of the current one, to place the informa-
tion in context and provide links/connections to previous, and
sometimes future, material which students often do not make
themselves. We also attempt, when possible, to explain concepts in
several different ways so that students could have a visual physical
representation, a mathematical representation, and a verbal de-
scription and explanation. This seeming redundancy is important
for learning and assures that teachers get to a larger number of the
diverse learners represented in any class.32 Within lectures, we try to
briefly summarize main points, and we end lectures with quick
summaries of the session. We are careful about what we write on
the chalkboard or put on overhead transparencies since students
usually determine that the most important information is what in-
structors record.
We strive to use pedagogical and motivational principles which
appeal to a diverse population so that we do not inadvertently ex-
clude anyone. For example, we teach knowledge in context and
through real-life examples which students can identify with or visu-
alize; we provide experiential learning so that students can experi-
ence trial and error; we allow for extended periods of observation
and testing for the projects; and we insist that students apply theo-
retical material learned. These factors have been cited by numerous
authors as necessary for attracting and retaining female and minori-
ty students.33,34
B. Adapting to Freshmen Student Development
We try to provide enough and diverse learning experiences and
emphasize their value so that students understand the importance
of reading the assigned material, coming to class, completing the
assignments on time, doing extra problems if necessary, and asking
for help when the situation warrants it (principle #5). To ensure
that students attend class, we purposely created a structure to moti-
vate them. We lecture on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and
on each of these days students need either to pick up or turn in
homework assignments or take a quiz; on Mondays, we return their
graded homework which they have to review for the quiz on
Wednesday; on Wednesdays, we administer a 15-minute quiz; and
on Fridays, we return the graded quiz, collect the homework as-
signment, and hand out the new homework assignment. The
recitations are scheduled on Thursdays, the day before the home-
work is due, so that students can work on the homework and bring
questions they may have to the recitations. Finally, the instructor
holds office hours on Wednesdays and the teaching assistants on
Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Research on educational psychology has shown that perceived
self-efficacy is essential for students to achieve good performance
and persistence in any field including science, mathematics, and en-
gineering.35 Perceived self-efficacy is developed through accom-
April 1997
plishments, through observing others like ourselves perform and
succeed, through freedom from anxiety with respect to learning,
and through persuasion and support. Therefore, we attempt to pre-
sent class material and create assignments in a way that is not intim-
idating, yet challenging, so students can be confident that by work-
ing hard, by dedicating time on task, and by seeking help when
necessary, they can master the subjects introduced in class.
C. Providing Effective Feedback
We administer weekly quizzes and assign weekly homework so
that students have the opportunity to practice new skills and/or
apply new material, thus enabling them and us to closely monitor
their learning. We provide frequent, timely, and prescriptive feed-
back on quizzes and homework assignments to help students un-
derstand not only where they went wrong but why. We return
graded quizzes during the class after we administer them and briefly
discuss solutions during that class. We post solutions to the home-
work problems the same day they are due. We are careful that our
solution sets or explanations are thorough, because often experts in
a field skip or combine steps which are second nature to them.36
Therefore, teaching assistants and tutors review and suggest revi-
sions to the written solutions before we distribute them to students.
D. Utilizing Learning Activities
We created classroom demonstrations and adapted laboratory
experiments for the first-year audience to keep them interested and
motivated. The demonstrations in the classroom include, for exam-
ple, the operation of a four-stroke gasoline engine, drag and viscous
effects, balancing moments and forces, gyroscopic effects, four-bar
linkage mechanisms, tensile test of rubber bands and creep of sol-
der. The laboratory experiments include tensile tests, two-stage air
compressor, ramjet, steam turbine, open channel flow with hy-
draulic jump, and infrared temperature equipment. We also include
a visit to a steam generation plant, which provides steam for the
Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh Medical Center heating systems
and is located within walking distance of our campus. The students
have an opportunity to observe the operation of coal- and gas-fired
industrial boilers and the water treatment plant. We also created
hands-on assignments and term projects in which students apply
the principles taught in the lectures to physical prototypes so that
they actually experience the application of concepts and principles
which often appear abstract.
Because of the group projects, we need to make sure that stu-
dents function well in groups; many of them have never worked in
groups on educational projects before. We include activities in
which students have the opportunity to explore group dynamics
and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, stu-
dents learn through their own experience (by practicing, not just
reading and talking!) about the advantages of team efforts, the po-
tential problems surrounding group dynamics, the importance of
effective communication skills, the necessity of effective planning,
the constraints of tight time schedules and their impact on project
activities, the responsibilities of individuals and groups within a
project team, and the value of different talents and skills. We also
talk explicitly with them about both the advantages and challenges
of working in teams.
Journal of Engineering Education 179
 V. EVALUATION: FORMATIVE AND SUMMATIVE
We perform several formative evaluations early in the semester
to find out which elements of the course are helping and hindering
students’ learning and use this information to make changes as the
course progresses and in future semesters. We administer an early
course evaluation a few weeks into the course and ask students the
following four questions:
• What are the strongest features of this course and of the in-
structor; in other words, what contributes most to your
learning?
• What specific suggestions do you have for changes that
would improve the course?
• Do you think you have adequate background to be successful
in this course? If yes, what do you think prepared you to be
successful in this course (i.e. strong calculus or physics back-
ground? effective study skills? effective problem solving
strategies?) If no, what type of background or preparation
would have helped you?
• Is the pace of the course too fast, just right, or too slow?
We also asked the Director of the Carnegie Mellon Eberly
Center for Teaching Excellence to observe classes several times
during each semester to provide feedback and talk with students in
focus groups to gather further and more detailed information on
the course, its strengths and weaknesses. Informal, luncheon-type
activities were organized which provided open-ended feedback so
that there is no bias in feedback provided by students when specific
questions are asked. This information was shared and discussed
with the instructors and changes were made the next time the
course was taught. Finally, the weekly quizzes helped us to deter-
mine if there were concepts or theories which we had not taught ef-
fectively (e.g. if most of the class could not solve a particular type of
problem). All courses at Carnegie Mellon are also evaluated by stu-
dents each semester and the results are published both on-line and
in hard copy. These faculty and course evaluations provide one in-
dication of student satisfaction.
While it may be too soon to determine whether these first-year
engineering courses accomplish all the objectives pursued, statistics
indicate that since the introduction of the new first-year curriculum
in the fall of 1991, the retention of engineering first-year students
to sophomores increased from 79.2% to 80.1% for the 1991 cohort
of entering students, to 82.5% for the 1992 cohort, and to 86.3% for
the 1993 cohort.37 Interviews with exiting students in the spring of
1995—the first generation of students with first-year introductory
engineering courses—indicate that the first-year courses have had
positive effects on students’ perceptions of their understanding of
engineering by the end of the first-year,37 reducing students’ attri-
tion from first-year to sophomore years, generating enthusiasm for
doing engineering in the first-year, enhancing interactions between
first-year students and engineering faculty, and creating good work
habits.
VI. CONCLUSION: TENETS FOR
DESIGNING AND TEACHING FIRST-YEAR
ENGINEERING COURSES
Our experience in developing and teaching this course for eleven
semesters, and the experiences at other universities that offer first-
180 Journal of Engineering Education
year engineering courses, supports the cognitive research on learn-
ing. Based on our experience, we propose the following seven
tenets:
• Actively engaging students in a course is vital to learning: we
provided opportunities for interaction during lectures and
outside of class, used demonstrations and hands-on projects
to stimulate students’ interest, and provided a lot of opportu-
nity for practice because time on task enhances learning.
• Frequent, prompt, and constructive feedback is an important
part of the learning process: we assured timely return of
quizzes and homework assignments and adequate feedback
on individual papers, with thorough solution sets and in-
class discussion of common errors.
• Effective collaboration is an important component of engi-
neering and integrated design: we created project assign-
ments which required teamwork and explicitly discussed
with students the advantages and difficulties of working in
groups.
• Clearly communicating expectations to students is impor-
tant for their learning: we carefully defined the objectives for
the course and shared them with students.
• Students are more motivated to learn when they believe the
instructor cares about them and their learning: we tried to
learn students’ names, we encouraged them to come to office
hours, and we arrived to class a few minutes early to chat
with students.
• Addressing a diverse audience, a variety of learning styles
and, particularly, a broad range of educational objectives and
backgrounds is important for reaching out all first-year stu-
dents: we used different pedagogical activities to address the
broad spectrum of learners.
• Carefully coordinating components of the course so that ac-
tivities and assessments reflect objectives, are integrated and
connected, and are at an appropriate level for the audience is
vital to learning: we mapped our activities and assessments
and assured that students understood the relationships
among lectures, labs, projects, homework problems, and site
visits.
We believe that students’ learning and our teaching require con-
tinuous monitoring, revision and improvement. We gain experi-
ence with each new first-year course we teach and, based on feed-
back from both formative evaluation like those mentioned above
and summative evaluation like end-of-the-semester student evalua-
tions and subsequent performance in other courses, we modify, re-
fine and suggest further developments for the course. Once we are
reasonably confident that the course objectives, scope, learning ex-
periences and type and amount of feedback are appropriate and ef-
fective, more effort and time can be invested in creating new course
projects, constructing new classroom demonstrations, and improv-
ing the course’s relationship with subsequent mechanical engineer-
ing courses which build on the freshman course material.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge Paul Christiano for his vi-
sion in requiring each engineering department to develop a fresh-
man engineering course, ad hoc committees in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering for brainstorming ideas during the course
April 1997
design, Robert Sturges for developing part of this course, Rea Free-
land for her careful reading and comments on this manuscript, and
students, teaching assistants and colleagues for their many contri-
butions to improving this first-year engineering course.
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Journal of Engineering Education 181