Engineering Education Bridges Theory and Practice

A love of building things often drives young people to engineering, according to Rajesh Bhaskaran, Swanson Director of Engineering Simulation, Cornell Engineering. “Students came to engineering because they wanted to build stuff,” he says. “They like to be hands on. At Cornell, we have about 36 project teams students can join, which is quite an unusual number. But compared to the number of students we have, there isn’t enough space for everyone who wants to be on a project team. That’s one of the challenges.”

Cornell’s project teams aim to promote hands-on experience and collaborative problem-solving. The 36 project teams include roughly 1,800 students from more than 30 majors. The projects encompass developing an autonomous bicycle, creating an autonomous underwater vehicle, building small-scale combat robots, and designing semiconductors, among others. 

This is an example of project-based learning opportunities available in formal engineering education. But the challenge for the participating students may be finding the time to do mandatory assignments and optional hands-on projects, which many students find more engaging but don’t always get credit for. 

Simulation as a Bridge

Bhaskaran is an advisor to Cornell’s Baja SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Racing Team, which designs, builds, and races off-road vehicles to compete in the SAE Collegiate Baja Design Series. He focuses on promoting simulation through integration of simulation tools into the engineering curriculum. As he sees it, simulation is what bridges theory and practice. 

“Otherwise, there’s a disconnect between the two,” he says. Modern simulation software automates much of the computation, turning the tool into a ‘black box,’” in Bhaskaran’s words. “So I need to teach the students enough theory so they can make sense of the answers that come out of that black box, evaluate them, and have confidence in them,” he reasons. 

To build a solid foundation, all engineering students need to study the fundamentals, such as beam theory. “But after that, I’d like them to solve some problems by hand, and then move on to simulation,” says Bhaskaran. “Tools like Ansys automate 90% of the calculation. Students love seeing things moving and vibrating dynamically in simulation. They’re visualizing the fundamentals. That way, they can apply simulation to analyze the theories they’ve learned.”

Professor Joyce oversees Project Mjolnir to design and build an open-source mountain bike adaptable to wheelchair users like himself. Image courtesy of Autodesk. 

The instructor-driven theory study and the student-led hands-on projects are “like two parallel streams of the education system,” Bhaskaran says. “Students can get only about 10% of academic credits for the work they do on projects, but I’ve seen students who are spending 90% of their time on the project because they’re so committed to it.”

A Bond Forged over Birria Tostadas

Matthew Abdallah, a mechanical engineering student at San Jose State University, observes, “In the classroom exercise, you get all the variables. But in real life, in the engineering problems I have encountered, you don’t always get the variables. You have to define some, and make some assumptions.”

Damon Haberman, an aerospace engineering student at San Jose State University, felt his theoretical learning, such as the airfoil theory, didn’t quite make sense until he began conducting wind tunnel experiments. “Building something with your own hands, designing it, testing it and redoing until it passes the test … That’s when theory begins to connect with practice,” he reflects.

Timothy Karpilovich, also an aerospace engineering student at San Jose State University, credited the school’s Formula One SAE racing program for his hands-on experience. Abdallah and Haberman were also on the same team. Of note, Ansys is one of the technology partners with the program, supplying the necessary software. 

“This was where we had to design and test components with real properties. We learned to develop load cases, set boundary conditions, and make sure the simulation setup represents real-world conditions. And we had to look at post-processing results to make informed decisions,” Karpilovich says. 

All three teammates agreed that studying theories was critical to “understand what’s happening under the hood” of the software. For practical application, Karpilovich says he’d prefer assignments with “open-ended questions that prompt critical thinking.” 

Students met once or twice a week in the class (virtually or in person), followed by lab hours. Haberman recalls conducting a wind tunnel test on a Clark Y airfoil. “We ran it at different speeds, to get an AOA (angle of attack) sweep. The airfoil had pressure tabs so we got an idea what the pressures were like. From the results, we calculated the normal forces, axial forces, pitching moments, which translate to lifts, drags and coefficients. The next step would have been to actually build a refined airfoil, because I suspect manufacturing tolerances might have been an issue,” he says. “I have developed a passion for race cars through this club.”

Abdallah was responsible for helping craft the team car’s composite wings. “We had to figure out how strong they needed to be and tailor our layup schedule to satisfy that. We made our part, tested it, and it broke, so we went back to our model and kept iterating until it worked,” he recalls. 

Aside from gaining practical experience, Karpilovich says he forged a strong bond with his teammates. It was a bond sealed with birria tostadas—slow-cooked beef served on crispy tortilla shells—from a local Mexican restaurant close to the race team’s workshop.

Hands-On Composite Styling

Wesley Barefoot is set to graduate with a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), in a few weeks. For the past four years, he was part of the Longhorn Racing Formula SAE team, responsible for composite design and simulation. 

“For engineering students, the school has a machine shop. We have material labs, where we tested materials with Instron equipment to see how they failed. We did annealing and normalizing [treatments to make the metallic materials more pliable and less likely to break], but we didn’t get to do actual material manufacturing,” he recalls. 

Barefoot says he did get to experience small-scale manufacturing, such as plastic casting or building force sensors on lathe machines, but he also recognized “it’ll be hard to offer practicum with some classes like dynamics [the study of the motion of objects under the influence of forces].” 

For some practical exercises, such as lab reports, participation was optional, notes Barefoot; therefore, they carried less weight in the overall grading scheme. This highlights an imbalance in the current structure: The workload of the class may force some students to prioritize the mandatory, graded assignments, but skip the optional activities or classes designed to give them practical experience. Barefoot, for example, joined the Formula SAE team out of sheer interest; he did not get academic credit for it, nor did any of the other nearly 350 students in the organization. 

Studying core principles in theory alone isn’t enough because, “reality tends to throw a wrench into things, so to speak,” Barefoot warns. He felt standard classes tend to miss this critical part of engineering. “We ended up building the first composite layup for the team in many years. We went from wet layup in Styrofoam to pre-preg manufacturing and simulating large components, like a monocoque [single-shell structure vehicle chassis] in three years.” 

Barefoot worked heavily with the racing team’s CFD (computational fluid dynamics) engineers and suspension engineers, using Ansys software throughout. “We got to see how things would flow in CFD, but it was difficult to verify that in reality,” he recalls. “Being able to see the outcome in a wind tunnel test—that would be the extra step.” 

Barefoot and his teammates had a chance to validate the radiator flow rate and pressure drop in a wind tunnel to create accurate heat-dispersion figures. But the lack of a scale model for the car prevented them from subjecting the wings to a thorough aerodynamic test. 

Barefoot believes, ideally, engineering classes should cover the product cycle—design, build, test and iterate—but he also foresaw some challenges. Aside from the time commitment and cost involved, “It would also be difficult to assign grades, if different teams are responsible for different components,” he reasons. 

Some tasks could be computed on simple laptops; others, such as complex CFD jobs, may require access to specialized equipment, like at UT Austin, where the school currently is allowed to use supercomputing nodes for Ansys CFD. Some design tasks are inherently harder than others, potentially creating unfairness in the grading system. 

An Architect in High School

In the middle of the pandemic shutdown, 15-year-old high schooler Ajith Varikuti from Ardrey Kell High School, Charlotte, NC, encountered CAD through Tinkercad, Autodesk’s free web-based application that serves as an introduction to parametric 3D modeling. He continued exploring 3D modeling on his own, until he became proficient enough to use Autodesk Fusion. “In our school, you can take an elective class on Autodesk Revit, which is not dissimilar to Autodesk Fusion,” says Varikuti. 

His design of a 3D-printable modular home that could withstand a class-four hurricane won him $10,000 in the Autodesk Make It Resilient student design competition. Varikuti is now entering 11th grade. 

In September 2024, Charlotte-based WBTV reported the collapse of several homes that had stood for years along the Outer Banks in North Carolina. It was a phenomenon Varikuti had seen growing up, while traveling with family. “If the ocean could move inward, why couldn’t the houses?” he wondered.

So he built several concepts for modular homes, first in LEGO pieces, then in 3D modeling, and produced them with 3D printing. As part of the process, he used Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to see if his design could stand up to the 150-mile-per-hour winds. In case you’re wondering how he got access to a 3D printer, he says, “In my freshman year, I designed and built my own 3D printer.”

If he could take any class he wished, Variukuti says he’d like to take a collaborative engineering class. “This is where I might work with a bunch of college students to solve a specific problem, under the guidance of a professor.” 

Learning Empathy 

Growing up in Ireland, Noel Joyce would cobble together what he described as “Frankenstein bikes” from barely functioning parts, to add a speed boost. But he paid a heavy price for his beloved sport: a mountain bike accident broke his back, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. Today, he is based in Shanghai, China, as a New York University (NYU) professor teaching an online design class built around Autodesk Fusion.

The heart of the course is Project Mjolnir, a project to design and build an open-source mountain bike adaptable to wheelchair users like Joyce himself. “Projects like these tend to go beyond the walls of the university and make a difference in people’s lives,” he says. 

Project Mjolnir is part of NYU’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP), offering students the chance to join multi-year, multidisciplinary projects that emphasize innovative and research-active education. Participating students do get academic credits. “We grade our students on creativity execution, what they learn through the use of CAD, and how they stretch themselves creatively,” Joyce says.

Joyce and his students usually meet for a weekly hour-long Zoom call, discussing design challenges and potential solutions. Then they divide tasks among different teams. “I’m in Shanghai, and some of my students are in Abu Dhabi. But thanks to 3D printing, what is designed in New York can be sent to Abu Dhabi to be printed, assembled, and tested there,” he explains. 

Beyond acquiring indispensable design skills, students also learn to identify with the targeted users and their concerns. Joyce points out, “With the integration of AI, software is getting easier to use. But with this project, students are learning to be more empathetic. As designers, they are learning to put themselves in the place of the people they’re trying to serve.” 

In the case of Project Mjolnir, this is literal, as seen in archival photos and footage of Joyce and his students taking turns test-driving the mountain bikes they designed. “If you have a project that’s so interesting that students just cannot help getting involved, they will stay involved with it after the semester, between semesters and even after graduation,” Joyce says.