The reimagined undergraduate lab experience provides students with the most cutting-edge and impactful education possible

A huge success of ME’s career fair 2023.  We had 50 companies and 355 students attend!  Thanks to Angie Lesko, and the UG team for their hard work and excellent teamwork. Happy to see some students come back as recruiter.

Reimagining the undergrad lab experience

The Penn State Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) has reimagined its undergraduate lab experience to provide the most cutting-edge and impactful education possible! To do so, we have fully renovated and transformed the existing Reber Building basement into the ME Knowledge Lab.

Completed in the fall of 2021, the space will be the epicenter of the undergraduate student laboratory classes.

In the Knowledge Lab, students will complete an entirely new, required 3-credit lab course, ME 435. Utilizing the cutting-edge laboratory, they will explore fundamental mechanical engineering knowledge, through the lens of solving real world problems.

These applications will include: energy, sustainability, bioengineering, big data, autonomy and robotics and advanced manufacturing.

 

The new approach for lab classes will encourage higher-order thinking skills, instead of “cookbook recipe” style experiments. For example, students complete a project to understand how a smart watch classifies human activity. By reviewing basic statistics for data analysis, applying statistical knowledge to extract features from data, they learn to understand the data input and output relationship.

More about the ME knowledge Lab Project:

https://www.me.psu.edu/knowledge-lab/index.aspx

 

 

More than 30 companies joined the ME Career Fair.

Many thanks to Ms. Angela Lesko for this successful event!

The diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI 101) program is a recently funded project by the Leonhard Center that aims to improve DEI within our department by fostering an inclusive culture by the following two strategies:

1. Improve the department culture by inviting external speakers to expand faculty awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the engineering communities and encourage faculty to develop course implementation plans.

2. Summarize massive web information for inclusive teaching strategies for faculties to one platform based on the nature of ME courses, categorized by course types and topics.

Project Showcase 2023

In this showcase, four faculty members from the BETR learning community will share how they revamp engineering technical course materials to broaden students’ understanding of cultural disparities, social inequalities, global challenges, environmental concerns, and ethical considerations. These course assignments span disciplines such as thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and dynamic system modeling. The goal of this project is to integrate concepts of diversity and inclusion into student learning across the ME undergraduate curriculum.

We are getting ready for the ME knowledge Lab Grand Opening!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This project couldn’t be successful without the outstanding staff and student team above and the tremendous support from our faculty members in ME, particularly the Lab Renovation Committee!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ME UG office hosted our first Explore ME Lunch and Discovery event to help students investigate if the ME program suits them.
Students understood the major better through a panel discussion and hands-on projects.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Virtual Reality Lab project explored how to improve students’ learning experiences with virtual labs instead of traditional ones. With assistance from TLT staff, we transformed a machine-based mechanical engineering experiment into two virtual platforms; a desktop version for broad student access, including remote learning, and a virtual reality version for immersive learning.

The virtual experiment included features like student progress tracking through user log-in and data capture, a real-time graphing system for capturing, displaying, and playback of virtual object movement, a linear story around the experiment to help with motivation, and a functioning virtual scientific calculator.

Link to the project video: https://psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/MEXR-03172020%282%29/1_hib3enc5