Three students wearing goggles looking over beaker with ice and wires during lab
“Stone Age,” “Iron Age,” “Silicon Valley” – these terms reflect major aspects of human civilization. From textiles to sugar, to transistors and smartphones – various products have proven critical developments in human history. What materials made them possible? What new industries did they spawn? What new problems did they create? What might come next?
Section 120: The Greatest Materials of All Time
How can we make engineering more sustainable and more beneficial to people and the environment? If that’s a question you care about, this is the E100 section for you. This is a course about sustainable materials and user-centered engineering design. Our goal is to teach sustainable engineering practices that will be useful to nearly all engineers.
Section 130: Sustainable Materials and User-Centered Design
students checking their plastic mixture
A river runs through natural settings, a river runs through urban environments. Most rivers in the world have been impacted by human activities. Our goal is to gain a solid understanding of river dynamics and related ecosystem services. As engineers, we will learn methods and tools to restore habitats for certain aquatic species, stabilize banks, and rehabilitate important natural functions in urban streams.
Section 150: A River Runs Through It
student making model on computer
This course provides a detailed overview of the engineering design process – the “heart” of engineering – in a broadly accessible manner that assumes no specialized knowledge and is largely applicable to most engineering disciplines. Students also learn various practical skills commonly employed in the design process such as basic CAD and CAE, TRIZ techniques, patent searching, and project management software.
Section 200: Design in the Real World
two wheel car made by students
Instructors from five different disciplines will support your exploration of the creative design process through a collaborative, semester-long project: a multimodal essay, that combines architecture, art & design, engineering, music and writing to make an argument, while preparing you to work on interdisciplinary design teams.
Section 210: Writing and Interdisciplinary Collaborative Design
students putting together wood cut outs
Microprocessors and computing systems have become pervasive and have enabled the intelligent functioning of cars, chatbots, computers, phones, watches, websites, and countless other systems. In this course, you will build the hardware and software of a complete computing system, including the microprocessor, operating system-level code, and application program.
Section 250: Microprocessors and Toys
New Section! More information coming soon.
Section 270: Next Generation Computing Hardware
In this course, we will provide a comprehensive introduction to the captivating realm of wearable electronics.This course combines material physics, chemistry, and engineering, based on which we can create wearable electronics that are reshaping the future of renewable energy, healthcare, and soft robotics.
Section 330: The Rise of Wearable Electronics
professor pointing out growth on petri dish
This section of Engineering 100 introduces fundamental concepts of bioengineering, biotechnology, and chemical engineering, and provides students an understanding of how biological systems can be engineered to solve real-world problems such as the need for renewable energy and affordable medicine.
Section 350: Engineering Biological Solutions
two students working on solar panel car
In this section of ENGR 100, students will learn about solar energy collection and storage, and more generally, about electrical circuits, micro-controllers, wireless technology, and energy/power. The first half of the class will teach concepts in each of these areas, where electrical systems provide information collection, processing, and networking for all engineering fields.
Section 420: Solar Energy and Self-Powered Wireless Systems
student observing solar panel works
In this section you will learn data processing methods by analyzing music signals the way an engineer would analyze other data from sensors. Motivated by music signals, you will learn the basics of Fourier signal analysis and synthesis – a tool used in many engineering fields, including Biomedical, Environmental, Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as Computer Science.
Section 430: Music Signal Processing
students fixing the wing with tape
This section introduces students to the engineering profession by exploring the engineering challenges to using renewable energy as a “green” alternative to fossil fuels. Students learn concepts of renewable energy, culminating in a team-based term project to produce a device that scavenges wind energy to perform a task.
Section 450: Harness the Wind - Green Engineering
student measuring their blood pressure
Biomedical engineers envision, design, re-design, and test devices on the bleeding edge of medical technology; devices that improve and even revolutionize the treatment, diagnosis, and monitoring of the most important health challenges facing humanity today. This section of ENGR 100 is built to give you the opportunity to learn about and experience this process hands-on with real medical devices.
Section 510: Design in Reverse: Dissecting Modern Medical Devices
lab partners working on an experiment
When developing new technologies, engineers must carefully consider the impact their decisions may have on individual stakeholders and on society as a whole. In this course, you will learn a variety of prototyping methods within the context of a socially-engaged design process. You will then apply these skills to address a real-world problem in the field of public transportation.
Section 520: Engineering Wellness: Technologies to Support Physical and Mental Health
student inspecting tool in class
Bioinspired design views the process of how we learn from nature as an innovation strategy translating principles of function, performance, and aesthetics from biology to human technology. The creative design process is driven by interdisciplinary exchange among engineering, biology, medicine, art, architecture and business.
Section 580: Bio-inspired Design
student fixing wiring on robot car
Autonomous and remotely-controlled vehicles are important tools used for exploring terrestrial planets and planet-like moons. In this section, you will design, build, and test a rover system capable of collecting microscale ore particles from an emulated planet surface and transferring particle samples to the onboard microscope for material characterization.
Section 590: Wireless Microscopic Ore Rover (WMOR)
students discussing experiment in lab
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 constraints on size, shape, and function.
Section 600: Underwater Vehicle Design
student exhibiting his project
This course introduces students to practical Aerospace Engineering processes by the means of design, build, test and operation of simple flight vehicles (e.g. hovercraft). This Systems Engineering Experience includes an extensive design-build-test-compete component.
Section 700: Intro to Aerospace Engineering
Engineers shape the world by contributing knowledge on how things work, how things need to be designed, and how design addresses the needs of people. In our section, we will use the microscope to improve on modern microscopes by engaging in a socially-engaged process of prototyping, soliciting user feedback, and considering the history of how the technology evolved over time in specific social contexts.
Section 760: Engineering Design under the Microscope
Do you ever have to swipe your M card more than once to enter your dorm room? In essence, there is always room for improvement in everyday processes. Continuous improvement in processes and operations focuses on consistently applying methods that improve the quality of a product or service.
Section 810: Continuous Improvement & Operations Management
two students test controlling a robot car
Robotics systems are beginning to serve a broad range of new and diverse roles in multiple aspects of modern society. But how are these robots designed and how are they developed?
Section 850: Robotics Mechanisms
three students testing lab equipment
As more people experience the real impacts of climate change, the need for strategic collaboration between design experts and local communities has become more urgent. In this section, you will use XR technologies to learn socially-engaged design and community outreach related to nuclear technologies for global decarbonization.
Section 910: Socially Engaged Design of Nuclear Energy Technologies
student working in lab
In this class, students will learn how to use a systems approach to build a sensor board using a micro-controller to take both in situ and remotely sensed observations of a high-altitude environment.
Section 950: Electronics for Atmospheric & Space Measurements
Rocket science, how we use rockets to move stuff around the Earth and throughout the solar system, is a confluence of several engineering fields including mechanical, aerospace, and electrical engineering as well as computer science. When a system is built, its performance is measured and compared against expectations given the design.
Section 980: Rocket Science