ENGR 100-600 Course Description

This is a design-build-test-communicate course with a heavy emphasis on team-based, project-based, collaborative learning. That mouthful is a fancy way of saying: you will gain a lot of introductory-level engineering experience by building something interesting with a group of people!

Project

In our section, you will work in a team of five to design, build, test, and communicate about a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), sometimes called a submersible, for underwater exploration. The ROV has a set of tasks that it will need to do, but otherwise this is a “free design” project with minimal constraintson size, shape, and function. Your team will be provided with raw building materials, four thrusters, a blank control box, toggle switches and buttons, and a payload consisting of a battery, a video camera (to “see what the ROV sees” and help complete the set of tasks), and a tether to a float. The float connects wirelessly to a control box that you will design and build. You will have an opportunity to test your ROV in the towing tank at the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory (MHL) in West Hall. An ROV showcase is held on a weekend near the end of the semester at the MHL. At the showcase, your team will present its ROV design to our industry sponsor and then conduct final ROV testing in the MHL’s towing tank. A written progress report and a final report are also deliverables for this project.

Lecture, Discussion, and Lab

This section has a lecture component, a discussion component, and a lab component. The lectures are a time when content is provided and/or practiced; they are highly group/team-oriented and taught in a “studio” style where you sit with your team or other small group. Discussions are a time when we provide and practice content that is more suitable to a smaller class size. Labs are when you will gain the hands-on build and test experience with your team. Throughout the course, collaboration is highly encouraged and required. To emphasize the importance of collaboration in ENGR 100-600, course engagement points are assigned to many activities in lecture, discussion, and lab. If you miss a lot of class, you will not earn these points, and it will be difficult to do well in the course.

Your team will use a dedicated lab to construct and test your ROV during regular lab times and open lab times provided by the Instructional Assistants (IAs) for the class. Peer mentors -- students who have previously taken this course -- are assigned to each team to provide design guidance and offer support. 

Course Content and Workload

The goal of ENGR 100-600 is to provide an opportunity for you to gain experience in a wide range of engineering skills. Before you get super excited that you are going to become an expert hydrodynamicist after a single introductory engineering course, we want to remind you that this is an intro course. And it’s an intro course that is focused on communication and hands-on learning in a general engineering sense. We don’t have the time to go deep into any technical content. However, we will touch on the following engineering topics within the context of the ROV project: team communication and collaboration, 3D modeling and printing, pressure, buoyancy, stability, technical documentation (presentations and reports), basic electric circuits, systems design, probability, statistics, risk, and ethics.

Fair warning: Past students generally report that the workload for ENGR 100-600 is higher than other sections of ENGR 100 but that the extra work is worth it. More than one of our past students has said that they owe a summer internship after their first year in college to the experience they could list after taking ENGR 100-600. 

Should you take this course?

This course will likely be of greatest interest to those students looking to major in naval architecture & marine engineering, but any student who is interested in a rewarding, hands-on introduction to engineering at U-M is very welcome. We’ve worked hard to create a multi-disciplinary project that will appeal to a wide range of students, so hopefully everyone will find something interesting to do!

If you are hoping to register for this section in the fall term but find that it is already full, please email the First-Year Programs Coordinator at engin-fyp@umich.edu to request your name be added to a list for winter term.  Do this BEFORE registration starts or we may not be able to hold you a spot!