How We Plan to Accomplish This Amazing Feat – Part 5
Who Gets What
At the beginning of the course, we envision that each student team will receive a “kit” of equipment, including the model rocket, the data acquisition board and telemetry system, and a laptop computer. The students will be given a choice of three rocket-body designs and the rockets will have more vibration sensors than available data-acquisition inputs; the students will choose their body design, and later in the course which vibration sensors to connect. Therefore, in Year 1, we will order all the equipment and instrumentation we need to produce each “kit” and to stock our instrumentation cabinet. We are projecting that the enrollment in E80 will be 80 students, and the student teams will be composed of 4 students each for 20 teams in total. We plan on constructing 25 complete kits, 40 DAQ systems, and 50 rockets to give the students a reasonable chance of choosing a desired body style and to give us backups for attrition and defective equipment. Also, many of the electronic parts and sensors come in 40-part reels with a minimum order of one reel.
As part of the design and implementation of the new course, we plan to conduct a detailed course evaluation as part of the assessment process. The assessment tools include rubric evaluation forms and student questionnaires. These assessment tools will be created in Year 1. We have had more success with rubric evaluation done in the classroom using paper forms, as compared to online evaluations done outside of class, so we plan to budget in-class time for this process, once the course is in session.
In the Spring of Year 1 (January through May, 2008), we will launch the new E80. Both PIs will be involved in the teaching of the course, as well as in the administration of the assessment tools.
During the Fall and Spring of Year 1, we will also begin planning and design of our outreach workshop. The process will include the construction of an invitations list, design of workshop content, and the planning of the logistics of the workshop. The preliminary plan is for a five-day workshop hosted here at Harvey Mudd with the final day where the participants launch their rockets at Lucerne Dry Lake Bed about an hour’s drive away from campus.
