Manufacturing Engineering Curriculum Renewal in a General BSE Program

After many years of absence, in the spring of 2009 we started to offer the manufacturing engineering curriculum again to the students in the BSE program at Geneva College as engineering electives.The aim was to strengthen the manufacturing engineering preparation/background of our engineering students (especially those in the mechanical engineering concentration) to meet the needs of local industry.A three credit course in manufacturing engineering and a three credit course in quality engineering are being offered in the spring semester in alternate years.We immediately saw the benefit of this arrangement from the feedback of our recent graduates in the industry.In this paper, the authors summarize what was learned from integrating manufacturing engineering concepts into mechanical design curriculum, and incorporating global aspects of manufacturing in manufacturing engineering curriculum.We will outline some of the changes we have made to the curriculum and the challenges we have faced.Topics of discussion also include immersing students in an industrial setting in and outside of classrooms and hands-on project-based experiential learning.