"In just five to 10 years' time, the Web will be the preeminent forum for students to receive their class lectures. Thus universities will have to specialize to such a degree that there may be only a handful of them offering lectures, via the Web, in any given area of engineering."¹ So stated Woodie Flowers, MIT professor and ASME's 1999 Edwin F. Church Award winner for eminent service in mechanical engineering education -- in his keynote address, "Why Change? Been Doin' It This Way for 4,000 Years!" -- to a group of mechanical-engineering department chairs at ASME's 2000 Mechanical Engineering Education Conference.

Flowers went on to say that this specialization will force university faculties to shoulder more of the responsibility for creating highly interactive educational environments, which put more emphasis on activities that can't easily be duplicated on the Web. "Laboratory experience and multi-disciplinary group design projects involving teams of students at the same university and students at other universities may be the kinds of activities that learning institutions will use to distinguish themselves from each other."¹

While this prediction may seem extreme, the call for significant, purposeful, and timely educational innovation comes from various credible sources. Notre Dame's own Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable, referring in large part to competitive pressures which attend new electronic modes of communication, and the need for connectedness and specialization alluded to by Flowers, begins its spring 2000 report with the words: "Change in higher education in the future will be rapid and far-reaching, deeply affecting Notre Dame. ND must be proactive and imaginative."²

ABET, our engineering accrediting organization, in response to emerging demands of the new economy, and in anticipation of the need for widespread change, has overhauled its rules. Most salient in the new ABET 2000 formula is the invitation for the department seeking accreditation to create a distinguishing theme, to define many of its own educational objectives pertinent to such a theme, to set its own strategy for assessing success in meeting those objectives, and to following through with, and document, the assessment.

The Curriculum Committee proposes curricular reform entailing such a theme. We believe the proposed reform to be at once timely and consistent with the traditional objectives of mechanical-engineering undergraduate education, as well as consistent with existing strengths and interests of the faculty. The Committee believes that its proposed theme, namely the use of embedded microprocessors to create intelligence, versatility, and/or efficiency in many of the kinds of systems historically associated with mechanical engineering, represents a quiet revolution that increasingly pervades a range of industries, manufacturing processes, and product designs.

The Committee is mindful that an earlier revolution in technology -- one whose beginning is often traced to Isaac Newton -- is the application of calculus to the useful modeling and understanding of the most important physical principles for mechanical engineers. It is the academy that has primary responsibility for ensuring that related insights and analytical tools become part of the mindset of future practitioners, researchers and engineering managers. Because the felt competitive pressures of industry may encourage sheer empirical, phenomenological, or trial-and-error practice for many engineers, provision of a firm, enabling, insight-producing foundation in engineering science must be taken as "job 1" in the Department. Any curricular theme or specialization must at least coexist benignly with, and ideally would complement, this primary job.

Part of the job entails the often difficult connection of analysis with the creative process of design. The microprocessor itself, allowing as it does the application of mathematically based algorithms to meet specific design requirements, could promote such ability. The Committee's proposed curriculum change entails many small microprocessor-based design objectives to be assigned in several (primarily laboratory) courses; and it also entails a dedicated course with the specific objective of providing exposure to microprocessor-based strategies in design.

These new elements inevitably reduce marginally the time expressly devoted to engineering-science topics including mathematics; however, the Committee believes that effects of the tradeoff can be minimized by taking advantage of the above prospects of the microprocessor to complement engineering-science education. Furthermore, proposed partial reformulation of engineering-science-course content, and judicious topic regrouping, can make the reduced classroom time more efficient and effective by emphasizing the broadly unifying aspects of the application of calculus and differential equations to key mechanical-engineering physical principles and control strategies. (Some faculty have suggested, independently of other considerations, the need to do a better job of making students appreciate the meaning, relevance and power of their mathematics to summarize and understand the mechanical and thermal behavior of fluids, solids and rigid bodies, as well as coupled controller/plant behavior.) As discussed herein, similar efficiencies can be brought to our laboratory courses.

Practical considerations associated with implementation of these reforms include cost, faculty involvement, a graceful transition period that does not diminish sensitive interim enrollment numbers, and pertinent input from the kinds of industrial constituents likely to hire our graduates. The National Science Foundation will defray the cost by supplying approximately $450,000 specifically for this curriculum effort during a three-year transition period by way of its "Action Agenda for Engineering Curriculum Innovation" program. Whereas not all faculty endorse unequivocally the proposed direction, enthusiasm is widely enough distributed to make cooperation in the affected courses likely. The NSF grant actually includes funding for summer faculty training as well as for hiring support staff to assist faculty. Also, the transition period promises to be gradual in that the three years of the NSF grant, which begin fall 2000, follow a period of four years during which the microprocessor has already been an integral part of all mechanical-engineering Senior Design projects; and the three-year period follows by one year a coincidental move by the College to introduce microprocessor programming into a 2-course First-Year sequence for all Engineering intents. Moreover, student frustration with learning to use a new, rather complex tool should be mitigated since the express intent is to apply the same physical processor to all course experiences from freshman engineering through interim engineering labs and courses and all the way to Senior Design. Finally, arguably the best corporate partner in the world for the proposed reform, Delphi Corporation, is less than 100 miles south of Notre Dame, in Kokomo, Indiana. Whereas the various kinds of automotive subsystems that now, or will in the future, entail embedded microprocessors tend to be furnished by specialized companies, Delphi is unique in developing and marketing to automotive manufacturers the full and diverse range of such systems. Delphi is enthusiastic in its support, and has promised advice and substantive support in several aspects of this effort.

Whether or not, as Prof. Flowers predicts, "in just five to 10 years' time, the Web will be the preeminent forum for students to receive their class lectures," the Committee believes that the proposed reform is a prudent and timely step to help ensure Mechanical Engineering vitality at Notre Dame in the years to come.