Airplanes for everyone: A general education course for non-engineers

Journal of Engineering Education, Jan 2000 by Eberhardt, Scott

III. CONTENT

AA101: Air and Space Vehicles is intended to be an overview of aerospace engineering. The University of Washington is on the quarter system, which means that the content must be contained in a 10 week quarter, plus a finals week. The course is five credits which allows for four hours of lecture each week and a two-hour lab.

The ten weeks are split roughly 60/40 between airplanes and space. This is going to be changed to 50/50 during the 99/00 academic year. Traditional topics are covered: aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, controls, orbital mechanics; but also history. Before much can be covered, the students must learn some of the aerospace language. It cannot be assumed that the students know elevators from vertical stabilizers.

IV. OUTCOMES

The vision of the AA101 graduate emphasizes a broad conceptual understanding of the aerospace field. The students are expected to be able to converse with professionals in the aerospace industry and to be able to pass what they learned to others. These outcomes have influenced the style of homework and exams that are given.

Goals stated the first day of class include being able to explain to others how the airplane works. They should be able to describe why flaps are used, why the fanjet is used instead of the turbojet, and more. Students should know that the Space Shuttle can only attain low Earth orbit and that the payload of the Shuttle is only about 1% of its launch weight. Students should be able to understand why there are launch windows to Mars every two years and what it takes to get there. Students should be able to formulate educated opinions about nuclear-fueled rockets and humans in space.

V. ASSESSMENT

Exams include essay questions to test the achievement of the course goals. In length, roughly half of the exam involves short answer questions while the other half are essays (four essay questions on the final). Experience shows that the students do better on the essay part of the final exam. Unfortunately, learning to grade the 600 essay questions (4 X 150) each quarter has been difficult. Giving each essay question the time and partitioning grading to TA's while maintaining consistency and fairness is a great challenge. In the future we are looking into using scoring rubrics as we have learned to do with the design projects.

VI. PROJECTS AND HOMEWORK

The students are required to work in teams on two projects. The first is to design an airplane and the second is to design a space mission. Naturally, these designs are superficial since no analysis is performed. However, the research involved in evaluating similar designs and getting information on the WEB is worth the exercise. A scoring rubric is used and given to the students ahead of time. Projects are allowed to be innovative, but they must conform to realistic physics.

The emphasis on the design projects results in less rigorous homework. A typical homework assignment might be to play airline executive and choose candidate airplanes for a particular market. Or, to research a particular airplane or historical event and discuss it's significance.