Distance collaboration and rapid prototyping in a freshman design team experience

This work in progress describes an NSF-funded project in which freshman engineering students work as members of geographically-distributed design teams. Students enrolled in the Introduction to engineering course (EGR101) at either the University of Kentucky´s main campus at Lexington, or the Extended Campus at Paducah, have been placed in groups consisting of students from both locations. They were charged with designing a mechanism or assembly using solid-modeling software, and fabricating their design using rapid prototyping equipment at each location. Synchronous communications between non-collocated students is facilitated over the Internet using standard conferencing software, and supplemented by telephone, email, and facsimile. This presentation will summarize the status of this work, and will more fully describe the rapid prototyping equipment, modeling software, and communications tools chosen for this project.