At Grand Valley State University, cooperative education experience is integrated into all engineering programs and is required for graduation. Beginning the summer following the sophomore year the students spend alternate semesters with an industry partner. Skills gained during these semesters are readily applied and leveraged to enhance the capstone experience that entails industry sponsored design and build style projects. The ability to comfortably interact with professionals in an industrial environment, manage projects entailing interactions with other portions of the business outside of engineering such as purchasing, skilled trades, marketing, sales and others allows a wide variety of challenging projects to be considered for the capstone design course. Frequently capstone projects are proposed by companies that currently have one or more co-op students. If appropriate, the co-op student acts as the point of contact between the student team and the industry sponsor. This minimizes the amount of miscommunication and also allows faster turn-around times for activities such as purchase orders, work orders and decision making. This allows projects which may otherwise be out of scope for a two semester course sequence to be accepted, and in turn increases the value to the sponsoring companies and the student experience. Sponsoring companies have frequently hired students that were identified as part of a capstone team that performed well. This paper will present a variety of capstone projects that were made possible by students having the skills and experience acquired through their cooperative education experiences.

The culminating project in a freshman level CAD/CAM course introduces students to electromechanical and/or pneumo-mechanical systems and drivetrains. In addition, it provides a third opportunity for students to explore the design process and to complete a design and build project. For two consecutive years, student groups participated in a modified version of the ASME Student Design Competition to fulfill this requirement. Adherence to the formal design process was enforced and monitored through intermediate project submissions. The objectives of learning the design process, electromechanical design, and exposure to design and build were achieved. Overall, using the ASME Student Design Competition as a basis for the freshman design experience was a success and will be repeated in future years based on the suitability of the design problem posed.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a two course freshman year sequence at a multi-disciplinary engineering school. The driver for this change was the interdisciplinary academic environment. The previous course sequence consisted of a CAD/CAM graphical communication course followed by a traditional C programming course. The CAD/CAM course consists of two hours of lecture and three hours of laboratory and covered graphical communication coupled with laboratory CAM activities as one semester (13 weeks) course. This particular course is named “EGR-101: Introduction to CAD/CAM” and this required course is the first engineering course that all freshmen identifying themselves as pre-engineering take. The C programming course was delivered using two hours of lecture and three hours of lab as a one semester (13 weeks) course. This particular course is named “EGR-261: Structured Programming in C” and this course is the second engineering course that all freshmen are required to take. The new combined sequence of courses includes similar topics with the addition of an introduction to basic electronics and microcontrollers. It was delivered using a two hour block and three hour block divided as needed between lecture and laboratory with mixed topics of CAD/CAM and C programming. A two semester open ended design and build project was used to combine the course elements. Final assessment result will be presented to evaluate the effect of the changes.