Design Challenges as a Spine to Engineering Courses

Abstract

The undergraduate Chemical Engineering program at the University of New Mexico has threaded design challenges throughout the chemical engineering core curriculum to relate real-world Community-, Industry-, Research-, and Entrepreneurship-based projects to fundamental course work. Faculty, graduate students, and dozens of chemical engineering students have developed, implemented, and refined these design challenges which stretch through the core curriculum from the first year to some graduate-level electives courses. Our goal with implementing these varied design challenges is to allow a diverse set of students the opportunity to see the numerous applications of chemical engineering to local and globally-relevant problems [1], and to help them develop the engineering skills and confidence which will empower them to solve these problems [2][3][4][5][6][7]. This paper presents the structure, sequence, and requirements of these team-based design projects as they form a spine across required chemical engineering courses. Participants are undergraduate students studying chemical engineering in the Southwest United States.