Engineering Alaska - An Introduction to Engineering 

Each module is taught by a faculty member from a different engineering discipline, such as civil, mechanical, electrical, or environmental engineering. By the end of the semester, most students have a clearer sense of which fields excite them and which don't. That's not a side effect of the course. It's the point. 

Engineering in textbooks looks clean. The ice road project looks like this: incomplete terrain data, a fixed budget, a hard time limit, and two competing route options you have to analyze, price, and defend. But before any of that, you have to write a proposal that scopes your own work, estimates your hours, and bills yourself at $100/hr. That sequence, scope, design, deliver, and invoice, is what engineering practice actually looks like. (ABET Outcome #1, #4, #7)

The ice road project produces two documents in sequence. The Engineering Proposal is written to persuade a client to hire you it leads with your qualifications and your plan. The Preliminary Design Document is written to deliver results to that same client; it leads with technical analysis and a justified recommendation. Same project, two distinct professional registers. Learning to switch between them is a communication skill most engineers don't encounter until their first job. (ABET Outcome #1, #3)

Quizzes can be retaken as many times as needed. In an asynchronous course where you can't raise your hand and ask, that matters. Mistyping an answer or missing a concept on the first pass shouldn't derail your semester. Retaking rewards persistence and keeps you engaged with the material rather than anxious about a grade. (ABET Outcome #1, #7)

A lot of first-year engineering students wonder whether they're smart enough, prepared enough, or the right kind of person for this field. This course is designed to answer that honestly, not by lowering the bar, but by making the work meaningful enough that students can find their footing and decide for themselves. 

ES F100X is a collaboratively developed course. Each module was created by a faculty member from a different engineering discipline, bringing authentic expertise to their subject area. My role has been to coordinate among those contributors, ensuring that individually strong modules work together to form a coherent semester-long experience for first-year students.

The course runs in two phases: the first four weeks build foundational competencies in engineering design thinking, problem-solving, analysis, and communication. These modules establish the shared language and skills students carry into the rest of the course. The second phase shifts to disciplinary exploration, with each module developed by a UAF faculty member from a different engineering field. Students encounter civil, mechanical, electrical, environmental, mining, and other disciplines through the perspective of someone actively practicing in that area. This is the core of what makes the course work as a discipline-exploration experience. This two-phase structure, the asynchronous course architecture, and the student experience layer described below are my primary contributions to the course design.

• Module Overview Videos: Each week opens with a short walk-through video with expectations and flags common pitfalls before students begin — significantly reducing confusion and email volume at scale.

• Assessment Rhythm: Frequent, low-stakes retakeable quizzes provide early feedback to students and early signals to me about where the cohort is struggling.

• Module Refinement: Ongoing collaboration with contributing faculty to revise modules based on student feedback, performance data, and course-level coherence.

• Honors Project: An original project designed entirely for this course, giving high-achieving students a meaningful challenge beyond the standard curriculum.

Honors Project: 

Students in the honors section work in groups of 2–3 to design and build an original educational module on an engineering topic of their choice. The finished module, including written content, two short videos, and a quiz, is hosted on Canvas and becomes a live resource for their peers and future sections of the course.

The design intent is deliberate: by producing instructional content themselves, students understand course design from the instructor's perspective, which deepens both their communication skills and their appreciation of how knowledge is structured and transmitted. Students begin by individually pitching a topic idea before forming groups, ensuring everyone arrives with a genuine point of view.

Ice Road Design Project:

Students respond to a "real-format" Request for Proposal to design a preliminary ice road on the North Slope, routing construction crews from the Dalton Highway to a remote gravel pad 20–30 miles away, hauling the gravel back, and doing all of it within a $2,000,000 budget and a 2,400-hour tundra travel season.

The project runs in two stages. First, students submit an Engineering Proposal that scopes the work, estimates design hours, and bills themselves at $100/hr. Then they produce a full Preliminary Design Document with two distinct route options: Option A optimized for cost, Option B optimized for minimum project hours. Students must navigate hex-based terrain (tussocks, sedge, lakes, rivers), manage water sourcing constraints, choose crew sizes, decide whether to pre-pack the route before the tundra travel season, and run their own spreadsheet calculations to verify every decision.

The project uses two tools developed by a colleague: a sandbox version with a smaller map and a built-in calculator that students use to understand how variables interact, and a full design map where students apply the Excel calculator they built and verified in the sandbox to a genuinely complex routing problem. The progression is intentional, with scaffolded practice first, and independent application second.

At the end, students submit a timesheet and invoice comparing their actual design hours to their original estimate, a closing loop that makes the professional simulation explicit and often surprising.

The biggest ongoing challenge in this course is maintaining a sense of personal connection at scale. The module overview videos helped considerably, but I continue to look for low-overhead ways to make a 120-person asynchronous course feel less transactional. Coordinating across multiple contributing faculty members is also an ongoing design challenge. Individual modules are strong, but ensuring they speak to one another coherently over a semester requires sustained attention and relationship-building with colleagues.