Engineering Design and Rapid Prototyping

This paper presents the second offering of a new undergraduate design and rapid prototyping course in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. The course combines design theory, lectures, and hands on activities to teach the design stages from conception to implementation and testing. Activities include hand sketching, CAD, CAE, CAM, design optimization, rapid prototyping techniques, and performance testing. The learning objectives, pedagogy, required resources and instructional processes, as well as results from the latest implementation of the course and student assessments are discussed. A review of the previous year’s assessments and a short project description is also included. A key pedagogical insight from this course is that design iterations are not to be interpreted as error correction or rework, but as an essential part of a sound engineering process. This paper was presented at the CDIO Annual Conference, 06-09 June 2005, Kingston, Ontario. They are posted here by permission of the author(s).