A revised course that gives students an unusually hands-on approach to learning the basic principles of engineering has been launched. It didn’t take rocket science to predict the early enthusiasm.

That’s because the latest iteration of Experimental Engineering (E80) is a semester-long required course that was redesigned to require learning in multiple engineering disciplines while directing course experiments to a final goal: to build, instrument and fly a small rocket, then analyze and report on all data collected during flight.

“Most everyone likes things that go zoom,” says Erik Spjut, professor of engineering and co-developer of the course. “We are trying to teach students to collect real, useful data from these rockets.”

Mary Cardenas, associate dean for academic affairs and LaFetra Professor of Environmental Engineering, went a step further. “There will be many instances when as engineers these students will have to take data, and not everything will be done using mathematics and computers. They will have to physically use instrumentation, correctly gather data, and make meaning from that data. This course is a vehicle to familiarize them with that process.”

According to Spjut, who developed the instrumentation used in the rockets, there are several goals: to help students demonstrate the proper use of basic laboratory equipment as well as computer- and embedded-processor-based data acquisition systems; to teach them experimental and analytical skills; and to enable them to effectively communicate the design, completion and analysis of experiments. The unifying theme? To fly and analyze data from fully-instrumented model rockets designed by students and faculty in the HMC Rocket Development Lab.

The course, which began Jan. 22, has several components, including lectures focusing on the science and engineering of the weekly labs they will later complete; early labs will teach basic electronic measurement and include construction of rocket circuitry. Using a wind tunnel, turntable and other technical appliances, subsequent rotating labs will evaluate wind speed, trajectory, acceleration, temperature, vibration, rotation, weight, drag, altitude and other variables. Students ultimately will test the motors used to propel their rockets by igniting them upside-down on a sensor to evaluate launch force. One of the final labs will use pre-flight data and computers to model the rocket’s journey—including the anticipated flight and descent paths.

Visiting Professor Samuel DiMaggio is teaching one of HMC’s most rigorous courses this semester, Analysis Tests of Mechanical Systems. The class enables those who are interested in the aerospace industry to develop realistic scenarios involving rocket launching and flight.

A 14-year veteran of the aerospace industry, DiMaggio instructs his class to utilize their knowledge of mathematics in hypothetical situations that involve aerospace machinery. For instance, he asks students to create a test for an electronic box (which sits below the rocket in flight) in the laboratory without a rocket. The test needs to be equivalent to the environment the box would face in flight. Some students may spend up to 20 hours on any given lab report. And they deliver impressive results, says DiMaggio, who has worked at Aerospace Corporation and, most recently, for SpaceX in Hawthorne, Calif. “I’ve been amazed by the quality of students here.”

DiMaggio calls on his students to “take the theoretical concepts we’ve discussed in class and actually bring them to life in a MATLAB basis signal processing script.” DiMaggio furnishes students with data that closely resembles that which they might see in the aerospace industry. It requires students to process and challenge the data, answer questions, and consider outside variables that may possibly affect the test results.

While the course is geared toward the aerospace industry, DiMaggio says that the material is equally useful for testing the mechanical systems in helicopters, airplanes, submarines and certain civil engineering applications. I want them to leave here with what I would call a ‘toolbox’ so that when they show up at work and somebody asks them to ‘go solve this problem,’ they actually have some tools that they’ve already written that can help solve a pretty wide variety of real-life problems.”