Abstract
To promote creativity and inspire innovation through the use of unstructured and open-ended problems, the design project for Machine Design this past year at St. Thomas was based on a national collegiate design contest: the 2003-4 ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) Student Design Contest, Mine Madness. Mine Madness entails designing and manufacturing a vehicle from scratch to retrieve simulated mines from a simulated minefield within an allotted time. Students embarked upon an exciting educational journey which is documented (through text, photos, and available video) from the professor’s perspective; starting with project inception through course end, to the official design contest itself at the regional level, and for some, continuation as another course project. Student teams participated in all steps of the design process: requirements analysis, conceptual design and trade-off, detailed design, manufacture, and performance testing. Usage of the ASME Student Design Contest was a great success. General pedagogical issues are examined and suggestions for application to future Machine Design course offerings are presented. A major conclusion is that one should not feel obligated to insist that the course design project is exactly the same as the national collegiate design contest. Rather, key aspects of the design contest (defined as a requirements subset) can be emphasized. For example, concerns over proper scale, can and should, override strict adherence to the contest rules. Another conclusion is that students are very motivated to work on this type of project because the national collegiate design contest has a reputation for being a high quality project. They also appreciate the possibility of continuation and recognition opportunities after the course is completed and become exposed to the sponsoring professional engineering society (e.g. ASME) at the student level.