STudio for Engineering Practice, "STEP", lessons learned about engineering practice

The STudio for Engineering Practice, "STEP", is a first step in introducing freshman engineering students to "hands-on engineering practice", including design, construction and testing. The initial cohorts of students have performed design team experiments supplied by the electrical, mechanical and civil engineering departments as well as computer utilization for analysis and simulation, in order to introduce students to those disciplines. The studio culminated with a multi-disciplinary design project. This project is in many ways similar to others being introduced across the engineering academic environment and one particular emphasis is to make the project cost effective in both finances and faculty time. We imported appropriate materials from other successful curriculum experiments to reduce development cost and modified the material to fit the local situation. Of particular interest is the challenge to scale up the project from the experimental cohorts to full scale implementation. This project was sponsored by the SUCCEED Engineering Education Coalition and materials were shared and imported from other Coalition members. The external evaluation is to be provided by the Coalition Evaluation and Assessment Team to reduce cost and utilize professional evaluation talent. The paper presents an outline of the freshman studio experience, a summary of the evaluation results, a discussion of problems encountered in the two year trial and a few recommendations to improve the project.