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First year engineering: Exploring engineering through the engineering design loop

Over the past few years, the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) at Miami University has moved toward the principle of a common first year curriculum for all of our nine majors. A significant component of this common first year is a one hour course entitled computing, engineering, and society that all engineering and computing students take in the first semester of their freshman year. Herein, we describe a recent revision to this course that allows our students to experience the entire design loop that is fundamental to engineering design. The specific project that we used was the design and construction of a HO-scale model train layout. The key to success, we believe, was not the particular project but the fact that it was sufficiently complex that it required a team of students to work for several weeks using each step of the engineering design loop.