In product design, there is often a disconnect between the engineers creating the product and the marketing team determining the best characteristics for the product. The research areas of "design for market systems" and "decision-based design" seek to bridge that disconnect through quantitative approaches that facilitate…

Consumer electronics are creating huge job markets for graduates with the programming back-ground, and more and more computer science departments are launching embedded software subjects to meet this demand. However, most students majoring computer science do not have the background in electronics, or even circuits. Due to this reason, how to…

Students are attracted to innovation and entrepreneurship. However, it is challenging for them to take courses in I&E due to their already busy curriculums. This paper describes the "New Venture Design Experience," a one-year interdisciplinary program that pairs core and elective courses between the colleges of Engineering and…

This article discusses two multidisciplinary courses created at the Colorado School of Mines that were developed to integrate ethics into the first-year engineering curriculum: "Nature and Human Values" (NHV) and "Innovation and Discovery in Engineering, Arts, and Sciences" (IDEAS). In both NHV and IDEAS, our objectives are to…

Ongoing technological progress in measurement systems triggered the development of an in­novative, hands-on teaching program to help students toward a fuller understanding of recent changes in the field. This paper presents a lab project that links theoretical principles with the practical issues of signal conditioning systems. This is…

In this paper we identify some of the issues and problems that we confronted while developing a new, one-semester, interdepartmental, multidisciplinary capstone design course. We implemented the following changes to the pre-existing capstone design course: (1) Utilized a website to enhance information transfer, (2) Modularized the course and…

The Product Design and Development (PDD) course is part of the graduate curriculum in the Engineering Design and Advanced Manufacturing (EDAM) study in the MIT-Portugal Program. The research participants included about 110 students from MIT, EDAM, and two universities in Portugal, Instituto Superior Técnico-Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST) and…

Problem Based Learning (PBL) has proven to be a highly successful pedagogical model in many educational fields, although it is comparatively uncommon in technical education. It goes beyond the typical teaching methodology by promoting student interaction. This paper presents a PBL trial applied to an undergraduate Digital Electronics course in the…