Integration of Green Engineering Labs into Freshman Engineering Courses

The emergence of sustainability and green engineering projects is re-shaping the engineering classroom.One of the vehicles for these topics at Rowan University is within the Engineering Clinics-project based, required courses.The first freshman clinic focuses on engineering measurements, and is typically the first true engineering course the students experience.The clinics are designed to be fully integrated and multi-discipline.The labs used in this course, and described herein, are all related to "Green Engineering", and incorporate mechanistic elements from all four engineering disciplines offered at Rowan (electrical/computer, civil/environmental, mechanical, and chemical).The uniqueness of these labs is that all have the exact same objective -to create a renewable energy system with enough power to lift a given weight to a given height.The energy source is the variable, and thus the crux of the labs.To operate the pulley and weight system for each lab, the students were tasked to create a: (a) solar panel array connected to a motor, (b) hydro-powered turbine system, (c) wind-powered turbine system, and (d) chemical reaction battery connected to a motor.Thus, all four engineering disciplines are covered and all the labs (and hence energy sources) are directly comparable with each other.The comparatively high student evaluation scores for this course represent the participants' high level of engagement and enthusiasm/