Engineering in action

Teaching assistant Zach Hathaway moves between freshman solving basic engineering challenges in the Sears Design Lab.

By Robert L. Smith Photos by Roadell Hickman

The Sears Design Lab in the Glennan Building typically stirs with sophomores and juniors completing a circuits lab. This day, it’s busy with 17 freshman discovering what it means to be an engineer.

They’ve been challenged to design a control system that will balance a small ball on a narrow wooden beam. They’re learning engineering principles the old-fashioned way — by applying them.

Huddled in groups of two and three at workbenches, the students tap code into laptops loaded with MATLAB software and wired to microcontrollers. The wavy green line on an oscilloscope tells them if their signal is getting through.

“Oh, we did it!” a startled student declares.

“No, you didn’t,” a passing teaching assistant responds. “This is going to take awhile.”

About two weeks. Then the students will jump to another project, diving into another facet of engineering by designing, building and testing something. The hands-on approach — piloted last spring — harkens back to the Case Institute of Technology and its emphasis on applied science. Eventually, every first-year engineering student will be getting his or her hands dirty.

There’s a back-to-basics movement dawning at the Case School of Engineering, an initiative to make “experiential learning” a sturdier cornerstone of the Case education.

That pilot course, directed by Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Kurt Rhoads, PhD, was extended this fall to two classes of freshman. Soon, it’s expected to corral every freshman engineering student — about 500 of them — into what’s being called the First-Year Engineering Experience at the Case School of Engineering.

The experience will highlight another Case tradition: using engineering to help humanity. After completing the hands-on classes, first-year students will be sent off campus to solve an engineering challenge. They’ll spend a semester on a team designing solutions to a community problem.

“We’re trying to make sure they experience the excitement of engineering,” Dean Venkataramanan “Ragu” Balakrishnan told the board of the Case Alumni Association at its November meeting. “Engineering is much more than what you learn in the lecture hall. It’s experiencing something.”

Staff and faculty have been plotting the transition for several years. Under Balakrishnan, who arrived in 2018, planning accelerated. Then CIT alumnus Roger Susi ’77, an innovator in medical imaging, gave wings to the idea with a generous gift. Susi, the founder and chairman of IRadimed Corp. in Orlando, Florida, recently pledged $2 million to launch the new classes and to build and equip a 5,000-square foot lab where much of the hands-on learning will take place.

Professor Marc Buchner, PhD, and Assistant Professor Kurt Rhoads, PhD

The Roger Susi Undergraduate Student Teaching Lab is now being shaped from the old machine shop in the basement of the Bingham Building.

“The idea is to get them to learn engineering by solving problems,” said Rhoads, one of the lead designers of the new curriculum. He expects the hands-on work to enhance motivation and retention as students find themselves saying, “Hey, I’m an engineer!”

Early response from alumni has been positive, often enthusiastic. Many recall their own hands-on engineering classes, or wish they had more to recall.

James Banks ’65 arrived on campus the year the Engineering Design Center (now the Electronics Design Center) opened in the Bingham Building. The Students Projects Lab was noisy with machine tools he used to complete class projects, he recalled.

“It adds reality,” Banks said. “When a student designed something, they didn’t really learn anything until they found out it didn’t work. The kid has to have the opportunities to make mistakes.”

Alexandra Fort ’13, an engineer for the advanced manufacturer Swagelok, had no exposure to engineering before college, so she was “starting from square one” as she majored in systems control at Case.

“I got a lot of good breadth in my classes, but not a lot of depth,” she said.

She thinks she could have used a broad overview of how a project comes together. So she especially likes the idea of a community engineering project.

“The more you can get the real-world experience, the better,” she said.

Jim Kilmer ‘00, MSE ’00, said he long saw the need for more experiential learning in his major, computer engineering. Kilmer, division director for the Opal Group, said there was often a disconnect between academic knowledge and practical application.

Students need to experience the dynamics of projects and collaboration, he said, adding, “As soon as you inject the human element, engineering changes.”

Those insights are important even for computer science majors whose expertise may be coding, he said.

“Obviously it’s not as physical as other kinds of engineering, but actually being part of a project, it’s a different level of experience,” Kilmer said. “I think this is fantastic.”

As Associate Dean of Academics for the Case School of Engineering, Professor Marc Buchner, PhD, is charged with implementing the new curriculum, which he sees as a return to valuable fundamentals.

The drift away from active learning happened gradually, across academia, Buchner said. As the Space Race of the 1970s shifted priorities toward engineering science, advances in computer technology, materials science and manufacturing techniques all had to be incorporated into busy degree programs.

“We went back to a strong science and theoretical base,” Buchner said. “And as we did that, we moved away from the experiential basis of education.”

Now the pendulum is swinging back, partly with a push from a new generation. Today’s engineering students are coming out of high schools with experience in robotics competitions, computer gaming and rocketry, he said.

“The students want to learn by doing,” Buchner said. “They want to be active.”

That seemed evident in the Sears Design Lab.

Jakob Wegmueller, a first-year mechanical engineering major from northern Virginia, said the pilot course made him feel like an engineer as he designed and tested control systems and created a piezoelectric crystal.

“You learn all these new things in different fields,” he said, a trace of marvel in his voice.

His teammate, Asya Orhan, a chemical engineering major from Turkey, said the class opened her eyes.

“It made me realize that all these branches are very much related,” she said. “This is definitely a great way to expose yourself to other areas of engineering.”

What are our thoughts on the new approach? How was hand-on engineering handled during your time at Case? Did you work on a community project? Share your recollections and suggestions via casealum@casealum.org.