A Clean Slate: Designing A Mechanical Systems Concentration Within A New Engineering Program

In July of 2003, a feasibility assessment and preliminary planning process began for creation of a new engineering program at Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus. The process began with a blank slate and gave the founding faculty team, composed of civil, electrical, industrial and mechanical engineers, unprecedented freedom and flexibility in the design. The team adapted an engineering design process to develop the program's curricular structure and content. A novel, flexible curriculum addressing the needs of engineering graduates in the modern, global workplace resulted. In this paper, we describe briefly the design process, the resulting curriculum structure, and, in more depth, the program's mechanical systems concentration.