Engineering Science 21
Dartmouth undergraduates are introduced to engineering in an unusual course called—
ALTHOUGH the professional and research programs offered by the A. Thayer School are entirely at the graduate level, contrary to the practice prevailing at engineering schools throughout the country, engineering education at Dartmouth today has a closer and better coordinated relationship with the undergraduate college than it had in the days when the professional engineering course could begin in the senior year, and usually did.
The basis for this present relationship began in 1958, when under the leadership of Prof. William P. Kimball '28, then Dean of the Thayer School, the undergraduate Department of Engineering Sciences was established within the College's Division of the Sciences and the Thayer School faculty took on the dual role of teaching graduate students at the School and undergraduates in the new department.
The engineering sciences are extensions and modifications of the physical sciences, mainly physics, for the analysis of engineering problems. Included are basic studies in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, properties of materials, and the analysis of stress and strain. The undergraduate major in the engineering sciences, involving advanced mathematics and chemistry as well as physics, is a stepping stone to graduate-level work at Thayer School and to any of the degrees described in the student profiles preceding this article.
The Dartmouth undergraduate's introduction to engineering occurs in a most unusual way in a sophomore course labeled Engineering Science 21. In all its instruction the Thayer School emphasizes the development of the student's creative abilities, resorting mainly to the design process as the means of accomplishing this; and the sophomore in ES-21, primed with one year of physics and one year of math but with no prior engineering courses, is plunged immediately into the realities of contemporary engineering by being assigned a term-long design project.
The design-project format for the introductory course was devised by Profs. Robert C. Dean Jr. and Sidney Lees in the fall of 1962, when the students in the class were divided into teams or "companies" and given the problem of designing an energy-conserving bicycle that would store up energy going downhill and use it for power going uphill. The job had to be done within definite limits of time, cost, and marketability.
Although a working prototype was actually constructed and tried out on Hanover's hills, no sophomore team came up with a really feasible design. But what the students learned in a great variety of engineering areas and the enthusiasm with which they tried this, discarded that, and gave long hours to the problem stamped ES-21 as a very successful course. Beyond the College, there was interest in this fresh way of introducing undergraduates to what it means to be an engineer, and such a utilitarian approach was hailed especially by those who believed that engineering education was turning away from the engineer and becoming too enamored of the scientist.
The second ES-21 project, in the fall of 1963, was introduced in rather dramatic fashion. Prof. Paul T. Shannon, who took over direction of the course in that year and continued with it until this past fall term, had the sophomores drink a toast- in water - to Dartmouth and to engineering. He asked the class what it thought of the water and then disclosed that it was brackish and had come from Webster, S. D., to serve as the starting point for the term project. "This water has a high content of dissolved solids," Professor Shannon said. "This is your problem: Design a suitable unit for the home that will desalt this brackish water."
The class was divided into five companies of twelve students each, with a faculty member working with each group as a consultant. How the students went about their problem is typical of the workings of the course. They first got themselves organized and then undertook various surveys to learn what processes and equipment were already available, to determine the average water usage in a home, and to see how much people would be willing to pay for a desalting unit.
The different companies chose different processes as the best bet, and then went about the building of laboratory apparatus to acquire the data needed for their designs. The final step was to put together a "presentation" for a board of outside judges at the end of the term. The winning design by the company called BRACON (Brackish Water Conversion) used the principle of reverse osmosis, and it was good enough to have definite commercial potential. With a working model the BRACON sophomores demonstrated that when brackish water under high pressure is forced through a cellulose acetate membrane the dissolved solids pass through much slower than clean water and are thus filtered out. The students had the advantage of using a membrane of special "reverse osmosis" character developed by two scientists at UCLA.
For its novel design the sophomores in BRACON received a prize from the magazine Design News, and one of the judges, William Chen of American Machine and Foundry, was impressed enough to invite the students to demonstrate their desalting unit to the engineers and management of his company.
AFTER the bicycle and water-desalting L projects, the next two years of the course were devoted to the design of devices for aiding the handicapped. In 1964 the entire class was taken for a day's visit with the blind and crippled children at the Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center in Greenfield, N. H. In consultation with the doctors and therapists there, the ES-21 students created six devices, including two communication devices for paraplegics who cannot speak, a triceps arm crutch, a prosthetic arm augmentor, and two standard-keyboard typewriters which produce Braille print. The winning design was one of the typewriters, a machine that simultaneously typed English words and contracted Braille without requiring the user to know Braille.
With Sloan Foundation support, ES-21 was given in the 1965 Summer Term as a workshop course, and six engineering professors from six other institutions came to Hanover, each with four of his own students, to see how Thayer School was introducing Dartmouth students to engineering design. The summer project was to create devices for improving the mobility of the paralyzed, and Crotched Mountain again was the focus of the work by the six teams.
For the fall term of that year, ES-21 students tackled educational and recreational devices, including toys, for the crippled children at Crotched Mountain.
Last fall, in its fifth year, the course turned to a new area of creativity and asked eight teams of eight sophomores each to come up with plans or models for underwater mobility or communications devices for aquanauts on the continental shelf. Four Ford Foundation visiting professors participated in the course and served as "coaches" for four of the companies. The impressive array of underwater devices that the class produced were a self-regulating, underwater equipment-transport device (a large red sphere with hissing valves which was submerged in the swimming pool and examined by means of movies made through the pool's underwater window); two heated wet suits, one using a chemical reaction and the other using water heated by preheated glycerine; a feasibility study of a system of underwater substations and subsidiary equipment; a portable taperecording system attached to the microphone in the diver's mouthpiece; a direction-finding homing device using a wrist meter that would have pleased James Bond; an underwater communications system using shielded cable in the safety tether of the diver; and a feasibility study of voice transmission using a LASER beam in an underwater communications system.
Presentations before a board of expert judges are still made at the end of the course, but the idea of picking a prize-winner has been dropped in favor of having the judges give a post-mortem critique of each of the designs.
ES-21 is one of the more demanding courses offered in the undergraduate curriculum, and the enthusiasm and hard work it elicits from sophomores are quite amazing. In the world of engineering education the course, with its emphasis on doing rather than analysis as the desirable introduction to engineering, has acquired a pioneer reputation and considerable fame. Several similar courses have been introduced recently at other institutions by faculty who visited Thayer and participated in the course.
Prof. S. Russell Stearns '37 has recently succeeded Professor Shannon as course director. In talking about the course, in which he has been a faculty adviser several times, he says: "Our objective is to give students a realistic experience in the practice of engineering, and an opportunity to be creative. More than this, we want to establish their need to know by presenting them with a problem, in an area unknown to most of us, which involves social and economic needs. The students must apply inductive reasoning and the modern methods of scientific problem-solving and engineering project-planning. We require them to develop and defend their solution and prototype design as a team, thus introducing group dynamics. Their final result is out in the open for all to see, and a true sense of accomplishment and pride in their work is very evident."
Members of BRACON demonstrating their reverse-osmosis desalting unit. Prof.Paul T. Shannon is at extreme left and judge William Chen second from the left.
Prof. S. Russell Steams '37 (c), the new director of Engineering Science 21, andstudents inspect the model of an underwater device assembled this past fall.
A "presentation" at the end of the termlast December, when eight teams demon-strated designs for aiding aquanauts.
