Hardware-based engineering problem solving for on-campus and external teams

Abstract

tract]: We contend that engineering analysis and design will continue to rely on the synthesis of experimental observations and theoretical analyses. For the past three years, we have been providing teams of on-campus and external students the opportunity to work with actual engineering hardware as a focus for engineering analysis and problem solving. Providing external teams of student with the opportunity to problem solve with actual engineering hardware represents a number of challenges. By focusing on initial value problems and requiring the teams to design the parameters necessary to achieve the desired system performance, we have been able to expose both on-campus and external teams to problem solving with testable physical systems and actual engineering hardware.