Our introductory classes go beyond the typical, immersing you in engineering through activities that will prepare you for success. That's why we call it Engineering+. In addition to lectures, there are small-group studios and professional development opportunities to help you discover your path in engineering. The course themes in Engineering+ explore the ways engineers design and influence the world, so you can develop an inclusive mindset through your participation in classes, events, and more. You are introduced to the majors, clubs, support systems and other opportunities in the College of Engineering so you can get the most out of your time seeking a degree.
Whether you know exactly what degree you want or are still exploring your options, you will gain the skills you need to be successful at OSU and beyond. The courses are taught by experienced faculty who can inspire and encourage you to meet your full potential and who are interested in supporting your academic and professional goals.

Courses
Over your first three terms, you’ll take three 3-credit courses that explore various intersections of engineering, society, and the environment.
- Each on-campus course meets twice per week for one-hour lectures and once per week in a smaller group for a two-hour studio.
- Studios are an OSU-specific course structure that supports students in practicing engineering work in authentic situations - collaborating in small groups on complex open-ended problems with multiple constraints and stakeholders.
Fall 2022
Exploring Sustainability Through the Engineering Grand Challenges (Honors)
Examine the different facets of sustainability (environment, economy, equity) as solutions to our most pressing engineering problems. Explore different engineering majors through the lens of Engineering Grand Challenges. Registration limited to Honors College students only.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jason Ideker CRN: 18650
Learning From Failure: The Role of Engineering Failures on System Design (Honors)
Explore the role and importance of considering large systems and system interactions when troubleshooting failures in systems. Examples will be used in which large engineering system failures have occurred in our society. Registration limited to Honors College students only.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Toni Doolen & Wade Marcum CRN: 18649
Engineering for People, Climate, and Ecosystems
Examine engineering problems at the interfaces between humankind, climate, and ecosystems — and explore solutions.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Frank Chaplen CRN: 18201
Engineering for a Resilient World
View Oregon State’s various engineering majors through the lens of resilience, while developing a systems perspective on global risks and stressors affecting natural resources, infrastructure, and society.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Meghna Babbar-Sebens CRN: 18214
Engineering Systems for a Better World
Learn how to see the systems all around you — the people, technology, energy, and information — that play a key role in building and maintaining a better world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Paula de Szoeke CRN: 18226
Engineering for Underserved Populations
Design and evaluate sustainable solutions in energy, water, health, housing, and transportation to help meet basic needs for underserved people around the world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Nordica MacCarty CRN: 18227
Clean Water – The Key to Health, Prosperity and Social Justice
Explore OSU's engineering disciplines through the lens of clean water and discover how engineering has both created and solved some of the world's biggest water contamination issues that disproportionately affect certain segments of society.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Tyler Radniecki CRN: 18228
Engineering for Health
Discover the roles engineers play in designing and manufacturing medical devices. Learn about some key medical devices, how they work, and how they improve health and well-being.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Christine Kelly CRN: 18229
Energy is Essential
Investigate the interactions of energy, climate, communities, and industry, and what they mean for engineers.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Leila Ranjbar CRN: 18230
Power to the People: Energy Access and Environmental Justice
Learn about the global challenges of access to power and energy infrastructure, and investigate disparities in safe electricity resources. Explore the intersectionality of this problem — with a diverse and inclusive engineering workforce, modern smart grids, and microgrids.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez CRN: 18231
Stone Age to Information Age: Materials that Drive Engineering
Immerse yourself in engineering disciplines with hands-on experiments measuring material properties (mechanical, electrical, etc.) and discussion of how, over the ages, the discovery of new materials has led to advances in engineering and design.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Albrecht Jander CRN: 18233
Sensors in the Wild: Electronics for Health, Environment, and Infrastructure
From wearable devices to smart buildings to global monitoring, explore how sensors and sensor systems are used across engineering disciplines for measuring the world around us.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Matt Johnston CRN: 18234
Automating the Future: Using Sensors for Control
Learn how to solve real-world problems by designing sensors that enable signal processing devices to interact with the world autonomously. Students of engineering will create most future innovations; you will start on this early by exploring how to solve real-world problems by thinking critically, creatively, collaborating with others, and using methods that apply to nearly all disciplines of engineering.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jason Clark CRN: 19920
Engineering and Nature
Nature has been on this planet for over 3 billion years. Learn how engineers can use nature as inspiration in problem solving.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Sarah Oman CRN: 19973
Trash to Treasure: Engineering a Circular Materials Economy
Our society is facing a convergence of social-justice and environmental issues the likes of which we have never seen before, from production of green-house gases resulting in climate change to the accumulation of waste plastics in our oceans; there has never been a greater need for technological innovation to manage our waste. Discover how engineers of various disciplines are developing new technologies to birth a circular-materials economy that will enhance our society’s environmental sustainability and social equity.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Lucas Ellis CRN: 19990
Materials for a Green World
Examine how materials selection impacts sustainability of the built environment. Explore different engineering majors through the lens of Engineering Grand Challenges.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Brian Baker CRN: 18271 or 20151
Software Design Studio
Experience your first day on the job as a junior Software Engineer, and earn hands-on training in the tools for success. Collaborate to design creative solutions to real-world challenges.
Campus: OSU-Cascades Instructor: Yong Bakos CRN: 17837
Design Across Disciplines
Learn how to thrive in a world faced with multidisciplinary design challenges and opportunities.
Campus: OSU-Cascades Instructor: Rebecca Webb CRN: 17838
Solving Computational Sustainability Problems
Apply problem-solving strategies for developing algorithms to solve computational sustainability problems related to climate, water, energy, agriculture, forestry, and social/human factors.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jennifer Parham-Mocello CRN: 18262
Design Engineering and Problem Solving
A variety of topics and skills to help you succeed as an Engineer at OSU, with an emphasis on computer science/software engineering. Topics include data, abstraction, design, logic, and documentation/dissemination — the so-called "soft skills" of engineering.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Eric Vogel CRN: 20004 or 20005
Computational Engineering in Daily Life
Gain confidence using core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures, to solve real- life problems using computation. Programming Language: C++.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Yipeng Song CRN: 20186
Computational Thinking via Tinkering in Python
Learn programming in Python by taking apart code examples to dissect, reverse engineer, modify, and adapt them. Then, solidify your understanding of the patterns you've discovered by designing new programs from scratch.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Yong Bakos CRN: 20179 or 20181
Winter 2023
Automating the Future: Using Sensors for Control
Regardless of the discipline or application, sensors enable the digital world to learn about and control the real world. In this course you will gain exposure to the wide variety of sensors being used to automate our everyday lives. Work in teams to build your own sensor prototype to collect and analyze key types of data for automation, and learn about the expansive opportunities available at OSU.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Brandilyn Coker CRN: 38713
Energy is Essential
Investigate the interactions of energy, climate, communities, and industry, and what they mean for engineers.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Leila Ranjbar CRN: 39053
Human Challenges in Software Design
Explore the social, environmental, and security challenges of designing software and the role of ethics in the engineering design process. While we'll examine these challenges through the lens of software engineering, they are not unique to digital technology. We'll also investigate the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges, making the class appropriate for all engineering majors.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Scott Kerlin CRN: 39041 or 39050
Natural Infrastructure for Climate Resilience
Examine how design can incorporate natural infrastructure (e.g., plants, large wood, dunes, floodplains) to reduce risk of flooding, erosion, and rising temperatures in river and coastal environments. Design calculations, studios, and analyses will emphasize energy dissipation and climate resilience.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Desiree Tullos CRN: 37955
Collaborative Problem-Solving for a Resilient World
Apply problem-solving strategies and computational methods in a collaborative setting. Work with other students that are assigned roles (e.g., engineer, designer, client, public) to address problems related to global and local risks associated with resiliency.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jeffrey Knowles CRN: 37960
Engineering for a Distributed Food Production Chain
Smart, distributed food production requires solving chemical, mechanical, electronical, and computational problems. Learn how to address these challenges to help provide reliable and tasty food production in urban environments.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Matthew Shuman CRN: 37965
Inclusive Engineering and Strategic Planning
Learn techniques including problem identification and definition, idea generation, team building, experimental design, and resource allocation. Explore inclusive professionalism, approaches to monitor and control complex systems, and implementation techniques crucial to push technology forward ethically in a globalized world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Ingrid Scheel CRN: 37970
Engineering Systems for a Better World
Learn how to see the systems all around you — the people, technology, energy, and information — that play a key role in building and maintaining a better world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Paula De Szoeke CRN: 37975
Our Energy Future: Design, Sustainability, and Society
Explore emerging and green energy technologies through engineering design principles, sustainability considerations, and societal impacts.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Natasha Mallette CRN: 37980
Thinking and Working as a Product Design Engineer
Learn methods and processes to design products that satisfy human needs in a technologically, economically, and environmentally viable way.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Christopher Hoyle CRN: 37985
Putting People First: Human Centered Design
Apply design tools and techniques in a manner that considers people first. Start to think about how people interpret, use, maintain, and live with your product. Learn how to involve people throughout the design process.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Anthony Nix CRN: 37990
Fresh Water for the Present and Future
Learn organized problem-solving and a variety of computational tools as we look at the supply and demand of water in the home, community, country, and planet. Work in teams to perform, check, and present engineering calculations as we examine ways to meet the growing demand for clean water.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jonathan Istok CRN: 39068 or 39094
Applied Engineering Thinking
Investigate engineered systems of your choice (CBEE examples include wastewater treatment, cellulosic biofuel production, and CRISPR R&D) while applying the research-based engineering thinking techniques you’ll learn in the course.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Devlin Montfort CRN: 40044
The Science, Engineering and Societal Impact of Nanotechnology
Learn to apply and evaluate nanotechnology solutions to today’s engineering grand challenges through student-driven exploration. This course surveys nanomaterial properties, manufacturing methods, characterization methods, with consideration of their impacts on health and safety.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Stacey Harper CRN: 40041
Computational Foundations
Explore foundational engineering concepts such as design principles, usability, problem solving, computational thinking, logic. Gain knowledge of Boolean algebra, truth tables, circuit diagrams, and Python. Boost teamwork, communication, and technical writing skills through a group project.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Eric Vogel CRN: 38255 or 38933
Our Embedded World
Learn about the embedded systems that control the devices and systems that make up our world. Gain familiarity with basic electronic circuits, develop your algorithmic thinking ability, and apply these concepts to build and program a microcontroller-based system.
Campus: Cascades Instructor: Kyle Webb CRN: 38427
Computational Engineering in Daily Life
Gain confidence using core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures, to solve real-life problems using computations.
Programming language: C++
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Yipeng Song CRN: 38447 or 39043
Computational Thinking via Tinkering in Python
Learn programming in Python by taking apart code examples to dissect, reverse-engineer, modify, and adapt them. Then, solidify your understanding of the patterns you’ve discovered by designing new programs from scratch.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Yong Bakos CRN: 40406 or 40407
Spring 2023
Take it apart! Reverse Engineering for Change
Ever take something apart to see how it works only to realize you could design it better? Explore engineering concepts while learning how products function and how we can design for change.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Sarah Oman CRN: 58655
Materials and Software for a Greener World
Be successful both at Oregon State and in your engineering career. Uses effective teaming practices that account for social justice and equity. Analyze professional codes of conduct and ethical practices in engineering professions through the lens of multidisciplinary and societally relevant engineering challenges. Develop critical thinking skills to collaboratively identify engineering problems and to articulate possible solutions.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Scott Kerlin CRN: 59632 or 59633
Measure Twice, Cut Once: Hands- on Data Measurement and Control
Learn experimental data measurement and simple control theory using an Arduino starter kit. Examine the physical phenomenon of each sensor, together with measurement reliability, accuracy, frequency, signal noise, and more.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Patrick Geoghegan CRN: 58656
Computational Foundations
Explore foundational engineering concepts (design principles, usability, problem solving, computational thinking, logic). Gain knowledge of computer science & software engineering (overviews, Boolean algebra, truth tables, circuit diagrams, Python introduction). Boost your teamwork, communication, and technical writing skills by developing software and researching in a group, and start building skills to find a job.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Eric Vogel CRN: 58635, 58636, 58649
Computational engineering for mechanical engineering methods
Explores core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures. Apply these concepts for solving representative mechanical engineering problems. Programming languages: Python.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jayani Jayasuriya CRN: 57259
Computational Engineering for One Planet
Familiarize yourself with core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures. Then put your new knowledge to the test, solving sustainability problems using computation. Programming language: C++.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jennifer Parham-Mocello CRN: 57267
Smarter World: Internet of Things
Explore programming by seeing how the Internet of Things is built. IOT improves health, environmental monitoring, and safety. This course uses hands-on experiments using electronics and programming. Focus on creating, not just learning. Programming languages: C
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Donald Heer CRN: 57914
The Python Prescription
Explore the development and production of pharmaceuticals through data analysis and mathematical modeling. Build your computer programming and problem-solving skills through project-based learning in Python.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Adam Lambert CRN: 57919
TBD
Programming language:
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Deepak Sharma CRN: 57921
Algorithms for modeling, visualizing, and testing creative engineering designs
Learn how to work smart so your computer can work hard by writing robust and logically structured code that does as much as you want in as few lines as possible. Convert engineering problems to programmatic algorithms by understanding and mastering the use of variables, methods, and conditional statements in your script. Programming language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Jeffrey Knowles CRN: 57923
Computational Engineering for renewable energy
Explore the world of renewable energy through data analysis and Python programming. Gain programming and data analysis skills through project-based learning and design of new programs with applications in renewable energy. Programming language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Liney Arnadottir CRN: 57925
Computational Engineering and Clean Energy
Learn core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures. Then put these concepts to work with real world datasets from wind and wave energy, hydropower, solar, and more! Programming language: Python.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Meagan Wengrove CRN: 57927
Interactive Physical Computing
Build interactive systems that can sense and respond to the world around you. You’ll learn fundamental programming in the Arduino IDE to program CircuitPlayground boards to make light shows, songs, a smart plant, and handheld video game. Programming language: C/C++
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Chet Udell CRN: 58509
TBD
Programming Language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Sami Al-Abdrabbuh CRN: 58557
Coding for Visual, Interactive, and Generative Art
Explore core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures. Then put those concepts into action, creating computational artwork and data display supporting a new generation of visual code artists. Programming Language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Heather Knight CRN: 58566
Computational Engineering Big and Small
Explore core programming concepts, such as variables, expressions, conditions, control structures, functions, and simple 1-d and 2-d structures. Apply these concepts to engineering problems at a variety of length scales ranging from the nucleus to the solar system. Programming language: Python.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Brian Woods CRN: 59612
TBD
Programming Language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Benjamin Smucker CRN: 59613
Virtual Architecture: Designing Sustainable and Scalable Software Systems
Transform creative solutions into real-world software systems together, with no prior experience required. Analyze workflows and data flows in ecology, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, and other domains. Design, build, and deploy real virtual servers; architect a real, online software infrastructure. Programming language: Python
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Yong Bakos CRN: 57812, 57815, 57817
Computational engineering for energy systems
Expand your knowledge of core programming concepts, including matrix operations, plotting, conditional statements, loops, and numerical problem solving techniques. Programming Language: Python
Campus: Cascades Instructor: Kyle Webb CRN: 58625
People
We are here to help. Reach out with any questions or to learn more.
Natasha Mallette
Director of Engineering+
natasha.mallette@oregonstate.edu