Providing first-year students with a realistic engineering design experience is both difficult and desirable. The benefits of hands-on projects to student learning and to student interest are well documented. However, it is a challenge to pose simple design problems that include both engineering analysis and engineering synthesis. The construction of a wind chime provides an excellent and yet quick engineering design problem for first-year students. This project can be completed with inexpensive and readily available tools and materials. It provides opportunities for the students to use good engineering analysis in their designs and opportunities for students to exercise creativity.Wind chimes have been proposed and used as a project or laboratory in a number of physics and mathematics courses. In this paper I review the approach and results of using a wind chime design in a first-year "Introduction to Engineering Design" course. In a portion of this course students are asked to design, construct and test a wind chime. They are provided with an equation to predict the frequency of their chimes that is based on a solution to the fourth-order wave equation. Students select their desired chime notes and use the equation to design their chimes. Using this equation requires simple calculation, care with units and the use of physical property data. They can vary the material, shape and size of their chimes.

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