Research Summaries

Back Incorporating System Thinking and Systems Engineering Concepts in Undergraduate Engineering Courses

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Systems Engineering
Investigator(s) Whitcomb, Clifford A.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary With the continuously increasing complexity of Navy-relevant products and systems comes a corresponding need for engineers with systems thinking and systems engineering skills. While some universities, including the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), have developed formal systems engineering graduate and/or undergraduate programs, the fact remains that the vast majority of engineering graduates come from traditional engineering disciplines such as mechanical engineering. There have been several recent efforts to introduce basic systems thinking and systems engineering concepts into the conventional undergraduate engineering curriculum; among them is the ONR-funded project “Promoting System-Level Thinking in Undergraduate Engineering Courses”, which has introduced some of these concepts into a sophomore-level product design and development course for mechanical engineering students at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T). The work in this proposal aims to expand on that ONR-funded project by: (1) extending the educational materials to both lower and higher-level classes, reaching freshman and senior mechanical engineering students, (2) expanding from a single university program at SDSM&T to reach Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and to incorporate the vast systems engineering expertise available at NPS, and (3) revising, improving, and validating the systems thinking skills survey, a tool developed in the previous project mentioned above to measure students’ systems thinking skills.
Keywords complex engineering problems Competency Model systems thinking
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal