A Freshman Engineering Laboratory

In September 1974, the Polytechnic Institute of New York (formerly the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn) offered undergraduate degree programs for the first time at its Long Island campus in Aerospace, Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering. This paper describes the Freshman General Engineering Lab, GE 103, the first in a sequence of new undergraduate engineering laboratories that has been developed to support these new programs. GE 103 is a two-credit, four hours per week, laboratory required for all Freshman during their second semester. The course is designed with a three-fold purpose: 1) acquaint the incoming students with representative experiments and instrumentation in the various aforementioned engineering disciplines, 2) include experiments which illustrate, where possible, the application of theory taught in the first year physics lectures, and 3) coordinate the freshman computer course with this laboratory so that assigned computer problems are related to experiments performed. With these objectives in mind, GE 103 has been designed to function as an introductory engineering-physics laboratory. In this paper we describe how we implemented these goals and report the students´ reactions to the course.