Work in progress — developing multi-country, multi-team, multi-term projects for a large, introductory engineering-design course

This paper describes our efforts at the University of Michigan in addressing globalization in project-centered engineering design courses at the first year level. The additional challenges that come from doing engineering design over multiple countries tend to be social. We have subsequently engineered social network motifs that allow a class to adapt to such projects and their associated clients/stakeholders. Emphasis has been on the transmission of artifacts from one team to the next, one term to the next, one country to the next that afford the creation of realizable designs that work for the people/culture for which such designs are intended. From Spring 2006 to Fall 2007, approximately 630 students in the United States and China have participated in this course. Data suggests that this network-based, artifact-centric method can have a positive impact on a studentpsilas learning about globalization and engineering.