(541e) Implementation of Joint Senior and First-Year Design Projects

Students in their final year of chemical engineering complete a design project that requires them to use the material learned over the course of their studies. In their undergraduate curriculum, the students acquire design and project management experience but very little leadership experience. At the same time, incoming first-year chemical engineering students have a difficult time connecting their introductory mathematics and science courses to their future engineering courses. While freshman students take an introduction to chemical engineering course with a design project, they lack the technical knowledge and skills to do meaningful projects. To help with all of these problems, we created a joint design project where first year students work as interns on a senior design team project that focuses on product design. The two classes share a one hour meeting time each week, as well as having separate class time. The senior students act as supervisors and mentors for the first-year students and give assignments and provide feedback for the first-year students. The design product is divided into four phases: (1) product idea development (2) final product selection (3) process design, and (4) final design. In addition to the assignments from the senior students (emphasis in phase 1 and 4), first-year students receive overarching instructor given assignments within each phase of the project. For phase 1, both groups conduct market research to determine product opportunity gaps. The first-year students are required to submit a report detailing their research and market analysis, but the specific research assignments were given by the mentor teams. Additionally, the first-year reports were submitted to the senior teams for feedback prior to being submitted to the instructor. For phase 4, each member of the first-year team becomes an expert on one of the following areas: safety, economic impact, or environmental impact. The student then researches and reports on this topic to both the instructor and the mentor teams. In phase 2, the first-year teams work with the mentor teams to create a weighted selection matrix and narrow down product ideas, culminating in a sales pitch, advocating for one particular product selection, to the mentor teams. Mentor teams select the final design idea. Phase 3 will have the most separation between the teams with the senior teams creating the actual product process design, and the first-year teams creating a product in a hands-on laboratory, a simplified block diagram, and a material balance for the process. In the first two years, both senior and first-year teams were surveyed at the end of the semester. This paper focuses on the results of implementation of the project in its first two years, and changes made for the second year implementation based on feedback from the first year.