The SAE Collegiate Design Series is a set of design competitions held throughout the world where undergraduate and graduate engineering students conceive, design, fabricate, and compete with student developed project vehicles. The restrictions on these vehicles are limited so that the knowledge, creativity, and imagination of the students are challenged. The projects are built with a team effort over a period of about one-year and are taken to annual competitions for judging and comparison with a number of other vehicles from colleges and universities throughout the world. The result of these yearlong projects is a real world engineering experience for all students involved. Working within an interdisciplinary team environment from conception to completion gives our students a distinct advantage over others who have not been involved in extra curricular engineering project teams. The program benefits students in ways standard curricula cannot. The ability to work in a team environment, the ability to generate funding and support, and the hands on skills developed over the course of completing one of these projects has helped students both in their engineering abilities as well as their marketability after graduation. At our institution, students will come into the project at the freshman or sophomore level helping the team to complete some of the simpler tasks such as generating funding or physically wrenching on the projects. During their first few years, our SAE Project students are required to complete both a manufacturing engineering course as well as a machine tool applications class in order to be permitted to build and fabricate parts designed by upper division team members. Once our students reach the junior level, they apply for and are generally granted class credit for upper division technical elective credit for design and analysis work on their respective projects. The student's senior year involvement in the project is used as senior project or senior design credit in which they generally take on a more managerial role as lead engineers. In the course of their engineering education, our most involved students learn basic fabrication techniques, team and group project management, solid modeling and analysis techniques, and finish by producing, testing, and competing in a project that accurately reflects what they will come up against in real world engineering. This paper gives a general idea of how we have incorporated the SAE Collegiate Design Series competitions into our Mechanical Engineering Curriculum.
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