A Freshman Engineering Curriculum Integrating Design and Experimentation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A pilot freshman curriculum has been designed and implemented in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The four-course sequence gives freshmen an overview of a broad range of mechanical engineering activities, ranging from system design and project management, electronics and programming, to technical writing and presentations. Students take a two-quarter ‘Introduction to Mechanical Engineering Design’ course and a two-quarter ‘Measurements, Instrumentation, and Controls’ course. In each sequence, the first course gives students most of the basic tools they will need and the second is centered on an electromechanical Rube Goldberg design project, undertaken by the whole class. Students develop the design concept, build the system, and prove that it works. They are able to practice skills such as communications, teamwork, time management, and experimentation. The integrated first-year course sequences have been offered for two years and have proved successful. The students were clearly satisfied with their experience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it