 10-07-2008, 4:31 PM
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NESC Academy Webmaster
Joined on 03-12-2007
Posts 35
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Innovative Engineering Course Completed
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The most recent NESC Academy course took students and instructors on an intense journey that departed from all previous Academy offerings.
Dr. Charles Camarda, former astronaut and current deputy director for advanced projects in the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, led a team of instructors and participants through an intense five-day Innovative Engineering course July 28-August 1 at Penn State University in State College, PA. The goal of the course was to help the 25 participants apply the techniques of creative thinking to solve a real-world NASA problem.
The course, two days longer than typical NESC courses, had participants and instructors working long hours at the Penn State Learning Factory. The participants completed two related team assignments: a simulated design for a capsule that could be dropped from a distance and protect the egg it contained led into a real NASA design challenge for a small-scale landing attenuation system. The results were “better than I ever would have imagined,” Dr. Camarda said. “I think the teachers learned from the course, as much as hopefully the students did. I think it was a win-win situation on all fronts.”
Goals for the course included having participants conduct real analysis of their designs and produce ideas that potentially could be developed further as NASA plans voyages to Mars and the Moon. Some of the teams came up with ideas “that I don’t think the program thought of,” Camarda said. In fact, two student concepts will be funded for further research, he said.
“We’re getting NASA’s problems into the classroom, where you have a lot more people coming up with ideas,” Camarda said. “For one week, it was more than we expected to happen.”
Creativity, which is crucial to solving complex engineering problems, is often missing early in the design process, Camarda said. He wanted to teach students how to extend and apply original, out-of-the-box thinking at the beginning of a project instead of spending months or more making a poor, quickly chosen design work.
The fast-moving five days at Penn State provided a fertile environment for new ideas, he said: “What maintained that intensity was the fact that it was a real problem, it was a problem that didn’t have a solution, and they also had access to the experts right there in the classroom.”
• Dr. Camarda, whose primary area of expertise is in thermal structures, was joined by colleagues from GIT, Penn State, MIT, NASA, and other institutions. Instructors and their fields of expertise included:
• Dr. Sven Bilén, chief technologist for the Center for Space Research Programs at Penn State.
• Professor Olivier de Weck, whose research interests at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are systems engineering for changeability and commonality and space exploration logistics.
• Dr. Ed Fasanella, aerospace research engineer at NASA Langley.
• Dr. Jack Matson, professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University.
• Joe Pellicciotti, NASA Technical Fellow for Mechanical Systems at NESC.
• Dr. Jeannette Yen, the director of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design.
Participants, though they found the demands of the course strenuous, were excited about the work they were doing. One course graduate commented: “This course renewed my enthusiasm for space and even working at NASA, which is impossible to put a numerical value to. One of NASA’s problems that I see is its inability to retain young members of the workforce because they get bored and frustrated, and this class is a way to help combat that. This class should be offered again and again and again.”
Dr. Camarda said he would love to find another real-world issue for young engineers to tackle in a subsequent course. “I’m a little prejudiced, but I thought it went great,” he said. “It exceeded whatever expectations I had.”
Innovative Engineering is the eleventh in a series of courses offered by the NESC Academy since 2005. More information about it and other courses, including videos and transcripts, are available on the Academy Web site (http://www.nescacademy.org).
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