First-Year Engineering Majors Bond in Classrooms and Rocket Flights
Hundreds of students in NJIT’s introductory engineering course, Fundamentals of Engineering Design 101, are having a greater shared experience during the fall 2023 semester than any incoming class since the 1990s.
Back then, Newark College of Engineering began customizing the FED syllabus for each major field. Chemical engineering students may have learned more about compounding and processing, while civil engineering students learned the basics of surveying and transportation systems.
Now the FED sections are unifying once more. With so many fields of engineering sharing overlapping technology and careers, it’s important for first-year students to get the same multidisciplinary experience through a common course, NCE Dean Moshe Kam explained.
“Most present-day practicing engineers do their work in teams. Moreover, these teams very often involve engineers from multiple disciplines as well as non-engineering professionals, such as legal advisers and accountants. We wanted to give our incoming students, the engineers of the future, this flavor of multidisciplinary cooperation and teamwork right at the beginning of their engineering studies,” Kam said. “Eventually we may expand this multidisciplinary style of teaching and learning to all four years of the study of engineering toward the Bachelor of Science degree.”
Assistant Professor Ashish Borgaonkar coordinates the FED-101 course and said it’s initially for everyone except mechanical and electrical/computer engineering majors. It’s based on the general engineering version of FED-101, with a syllabus that includes major-agnostic topics such as computerized drafting, engineering ethics, inclusive design, report writing and training at the NJIT Makerspace.
Faculty will analyze the course results and student learning outcomes using rubrics inspired by accreditation bodies and then decide how to proceed. If the results are positive, as anticipated, then the new course will become the norm and major-specific versions will be removed.
“Civil engineering, chemical and materials engineering, biomedical engineering, industrial engineering and general engineering all are participating now, so we have 10 sections, close to 250 students … We also have a very strong philosophy of getting your hands dirty. So, there is hardly any month where students are not working on a project where they have to actually build something tangible,” Borgaonker added.
This semester’s most notable project was a water-powered bottle rocket competition. Students had several weeks to design, document, refine and test their designs, within strict parameters. There were semifinalists and then finalists, with ultimate victory going to the team of Joaquin Ordonez (chemical engineering) and Jose Quevedo (civil engineering), both from Union City.
“I think our fins really helped a lot. At first we used these really thick triangular fins. But then we slimmed them down and made them nice and aerodynamic. We also put duct tape around the tips so they wouldn’t break off as easily, so it could endure multiple tests. It was able to go farther,” Ordonez said. A flight of 214 feet sealed their victory, sailing northwest across Lubetkin Field at Mal Simon Stadium. It was just a couple of Highlanders short of the winners of the previous NJIT bottle rocket contest in 2021, but this year’s finalists faced windy conditions and a restriction of 35psi of water pressure, vs. better conditions and 45psi in the prior event. With less wind, one of this year’s qualifying flights traveled an enormous 256 feet, entirely beating the 2021 field.
“Students are learning through fun and important activities that are also challenging, and giving them transferable skills that they can take to any engineering field they want to pursue,” added NCE’s Lucie Tchouassi, associate dean for academics. “We want to give them exposure to a variety of different things that will come in handy, next semester, next year, all the way through their graduation,” and beyond.
