Nowadays, entry-level engineers may find themselves in an environment that programming, simulation and modeling may become an integral part of their career. In instances that they are involved with enhancement and development of pre-existing programs, the size and complexity of a particular program may become overwhelming. Universities are faced with preparing the students to cope with the challenges that they are faced in their work environment in the context of simulation and modeling. Different tools may be adopted in various departments for training the students in programming such as C, C ++ , Basic ,Visual Basic, Fortran, or Matlab to name a few and the departments are faced with the question of what environment to adopt to train the students. One of the requirements of the Mechanical Engineering program at Alabama A&M University is that all students participate in a project in every course. These projects require utilization of computer programming. Two programming environments adopted by the ME Department are Fortran and Matlab. In some courses such as Strength of Materials, Automatic Control Systems, Analysis and Instrumentation of Physical Systems, Kinematics and Dynamics of Machines, and Finite Element Methods, students are given the option of utilizing either a Matlab or Fortran to develop their projects. In some cases students find that the development time in the Matlab environment may be shorter, easy access to the built-in functions may eliminate the "overhead" associated with developing and or calling relevant subroutines, and the graphical features in that environment may be utilized directly in their report preparation. This paper discusses how Matlab is used in the ME program to enhance the programming skills of the students.

The mid-nineties has brought industry close to a unified view that benchmarking is fundamental for strategic planning and development of improved processes that increase competitiveness. Benchmarking is nowadays applied to both products, parts, services, as well as to personnel. Establishing where a company is and where they need to be to stay competitive can be considered a "technological gap." By working with industry, professional engineering societies have documented perceived competency gaps in newly hired graduates. It has been recommended to include the product realization process into the engineering curriculum, as well as, to incorporate "best practices" as a means to develop new knowledge, skills and attributes that industry seeks in new engineering graduates.As engineering programs face increasing demands to alleviate the perceived technological gaps, the solutions have to be addressed in multi-year efforts. To facilitate the development of new engineering competencies, the authors have adapted/developed materials and examples for the introductory freshman course in Mechanical Engineering at Alabama A&M University. Goals of the course include but are not limited to: introduce freshmen students to the Product Realization Process, have the students develop a personal professional plan and to develop a basic engineering project to include market outlook, basic production techniques, economic assessment, planning, design, manufacturing, testing and product evaluation. From this point on students start their design practice portfolio. Building on these competencies continues through subsequent courses.

One of the key challenges to engineering educator today is how to provide a fast track to project and design engineering while providing the strong fundamental engineering education and solid preparation in engineering analysis and design in a four-year program. It is critical to build the skills necessary for engineering graduates to better meet industry's expectations and have successful careers. The faculty of the Mechanical Engineering (ME) department at Alabama A&M University adopted a system approach, denoted by the acronym SEAARK, for instruction and teaching. SEAARK stands for (in reverse order) Knowledge, Repetition, Application, Analysis, Evaluation and Synthesis. It covers the learning from the basic to the complex levels. The SEAARK approach for lectures is also utilized for class projects. The ME program strongly encourage teamwork on a class project for courses in the major. This allows students to develop a design portfolio starting from the freshman year. Project training continues through their capstone design course. The projects assigned to students are often combined with ongoing faculty externally funded research projects. The faculty of the Mechanical Engineering department is currently conducting research on "investigation of energy conservation in residential hot water distribution systems" funded by Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Lab. The objective of the project is (1) to perform a feasibility analysis of the technique or devices that can improve delivery efficiency of hot water distribution system, (2) to develop simulation model to variable hot water delivery methods and (3) to perform laboratory tests of hot water distribution conservation techniques/devices. This research contract provides design and analysis student projects to several mechanical engineering courses, such as Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Heat and Mass Transfer, Computer Programming, Automatic Controls, and the mechanical engineering senior design course.

The power and utility of personal computers continues to grow exponentially through (1) advances in computing capabilities through newer microprocessors, (2) advances in microchip technologies, (3) electronic packaging, and (4) cost effective gigabyte-size hard-drive capacity. The engineering curriculum must not only incorporate aspects of these advances as subject matter, but must also leverage technological breakthroughs to keep programs competitive in terms of their infrastructure (i.e., delivery mechanisms, teaching tools, etc.). An aspect of these computing advances is computer modeling and simulation of engineering problems. Many engineering problems require significant computing power, and some complex problems require massive computing power. An example of a complex problem is a model that combines several aspects of a flight vehicle. Such a model might include fluid-solid interaction, heat transfer and dynamic loading of structures, all of which are coupled. Such models can easily consume massive computing resources, such as a supercomputer. To provide a conventional supercomputer on a dedicated basis to our faculty and upper level students is not feasible. It is feasible, however, to provide computing power adequate for teaching and student research in the form of clustered personal computers. Clusters can be acquired over time as individual computer purchases and configured by our own departmental personnel. Parallel computing software to exploit the clusters is available for computer operating systems like Unix, Windows NT or Linux. Clusters also have the advantage that they can be used as stand alone computers in a laboratory environment when they are not operating as a parallel computer.

Nowadays, engineering professional practice has reached a substantial level of sophistication distinct from the old practices, that reflected compartmentalization. This progress has came about by a better understanding of a Systems Approach, industry's wider acceptance of continuous improvement techniques and a faster search, acquisition, utilization, adaptation, and deployment of technological breakthroughs. Engineering has become more interdisciplinary and team-oriented than ever before. Industry has demonstrated and supporting this new practice by reorganizing members of engineering divisions into production teams which focus on new projects, products or processes. Professional engineering societies as well as the National Research Council and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology are amenable in supporting attention to a call to new "Best Practices" for engineering from industry (i.e. elements of a constituency). However, in established engineering programs it has become a challenge to adapt to these suggested changes at a fast pace. One of the challenges is to provide a fast track to project/design engineering while providing the strong fundamental engineering education and solid preparation in design, analysis and evaluation in a four year program. However, it is to our advantage to meet the challenge, it is critical to the success of our engineering graduates in their professional careers to "hit the mark" and meet industry's expectations. While there is not a universal definition of design; it is paramount to realize that engineering design brings new products/processes/systems and subsystems to the specialized consumer or the global market seeking to improve health, well-being, safety, productivity, performance and cost.