A Hands-on, First-year Mechanical Engineering Course

Abstract

Mariappan Jawaharlal is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has been recognized as an outstanding educator for his innovative and engaging teaching pedagogy. He has received numerous honors including Northrop Grumman Award for Excellence in teaching and Innovative Educator Award. He is the founder and director of Robotics Education through Active Learning (REAL), a unique K-12 outreach robotics program, which reaches thousands of students each year. This is the largest event of its kind in the nation, and it culminates in an Annual Robot Rally. The REAL initiative has inspired thousands of young students to pursue STEM education. He is a pioneer in developing engaging, online tutorials. He founded APlusStudent, an online supplemental K-12 education company in 1998, and developed over 800 interactive, learning modules. More recently He has been involved in CSU course redesign initiative focused on redesigning bottleneck courses with technology. His interests are in the fields of education, entrepreneurship, product design and biomimicry. He has been instrumental in bringing many new products to the market from mere concepts, He is a Fellow of Biomimicry Institute. He has over 20 years of industrial, academic & entrepreneurial experience. Before joining Cal Poly Pomona, I also served as a faculty at Rowan University, NJ and Kettering University, MI. He is passionate about education and focuses on K-16 and STEM education. He writes columns for Huffington Post on issues related to K-12 & higher education.

A Student Assessment of the Value of a Redesigned First Year Mechanical Engineering Orientation Course

“…A detailed account of the redesign has been previously documented 1 . Briefly, ME 100L is an introductory freshman course that serves over 400 students per year.…”

“…This paper presents a retrospective assessment on a recent effort to redesign a freshman-level mechanical engineering orientation course named ME 100L (Mechanical Engineering Orientation) at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). The redesign effort completely overhauled ME 100L in Fall 2014 as described in Section 2 below and in Jawaharlal et al (2016) 1 . This redesign was motivated by two concerns: (1) The general information discussed in the old version of ME 100L, such as career options, library resources, and teamwork, is covered in a college-level introductory engineering course and hence was redundant; (2) The course's technical content was outdated, with the old version of ME 100L culminating in a rubber band car competition.…”

Workforce Development Through Experiential Learning and Collaboration between Industry, Government, and Universities to Solve Environmental Challenges

“…In some institutions, these are pen-and-paper studies, and in others they are hands-on design projects. More recently, freshman PBL (often referred to as "cornerstone" courses) has been added to many undergraduate engineering curricula to motivate young engineering students while teaching the basics of engineering design and entrepreneurship 6,9,10,11,12 .…”

Making the Makers: Building Hands-on Skills to Help Humanity Through First-Year Design

“…The deliverable of an actual physical functional prototype also helps to build selfimage as makers and creators because they have gone through a full engineering design process. Some first-year design courses do include physical builds, but most are centered on a robotic challenge (line following, moving balls around, battling robots), without a human-centered research narrative to show engineers serving humanity [6][7][8][9][10][11]. By integrating the open ended human-centered story, a wider diversity of students can be engaged about how engineers can use their skills to create items to help society.…”