In ME 382, a course taken at the beginning of the 3rd year, students are introduced to the design process and techniques to support it. In this class, three person student teams, solve the same ill-defined problem. By the end of the ten week course they develop a product and an appreciation for the design process. The culmination of the course is a design contest held the last week to find which teams have been most successful in solving the design problem. Often the problem is based on the ASME student design competition, which OSU students have won. This course has led to the text The Mechanical Design Process, 2nd edition, McGraw Hill, 1997, currently in use at over 20 Universities. A third edition will be available in 2001.
ME 518, a graduate course in concurrent engineering has been developed and presented at OSU and by video link to the Portland area. This course is the outgrowth of a short course formerly offered through ASME.