Engineering+ goes beyond the typical engineering curriculum, immersing you in a broad range of engineering disciplines and preparing you for success, starting in your first year.
Engineers don’t work in silos; they work with people of all expertise and backgrounds. Whether you know exactly what degree you want or are still exploring, Engineering+ exposes you to the ways engineers impact the world, so you can develop an interdisciplinary, inclusive mindset through your participation in classes, events, and more.
Courses
Over your first three terms, you’ll take three 3-credit courses that explore various intersections of engineering, society, and the environment.
Fall 2021
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: Jason Ideker
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
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
Energy is Essential
Investigate the interactions of energy, climate, communities, and industry, and what they mean for engineers.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Leila Ranjbar
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
Design Across Disciplines
Learn how to thrive in a world faced with multidisciplinary design challenges and opportunities.
Campus: OSU-Cascades Instructor: Rebecca Webb
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
Engineering for Global Development
Design and evaluate sustainable solutions in energy, water, sanitation, agriculture, and transportation for the developing world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Nordica MacCarty
Empowering Society: Fundamentals of Energy Production and Usage
Improve your energy literacy and gain understanding of the production, usage, and physics of energy and power.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Ted Brekken
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
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
Creative Code: Designing Apps for Everyone
Use your creativity, interests, and experiences to design software solutions to real-world problems. No experience required and all majors are welcome. Develop your problem-solving skills as you move from users of technology to creators of technology. Apply modern software engineering methods to construct software prototypes.
Campus: OSU-Cascades Instructor: Yong Bakos
Automating the Future: Using Sensors for Control
Examine sensors that let systems accomplish what humans cannot and the global implications of automation.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Brandilyn Coker
Clean Water – The Key to Health, Prosperity and Social Justice
Discover how engineering has both created and solved some of the world’s biggest water contamination issues that disproportionately affect certain segments of society. Learn how technological advances are working to provide limitless clean water to all on this planet and beyond.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Tyler Radniecki
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
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
Winter 2022
Automating the Future: Using Sensors for Control
Examine sensors that let systems accomplish what humans cannot and the global implications of automation.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Brandi Coker
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
Applied Engineering Thinking
Investigate engineered systems of your choice (Examples include wastewater treatment, cellulosic biofuel production, and CRISPR) while applying the research-based engineering thinking techniques you’ll learn in the course. We explore engineering as a profession, culture and way of thinking.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Devlin Montfort
Measure Twice Cut Once: Hands-on Data Measurement and Control
Learn experimental data measurement and simple control theory using an Arduino “starter kit.” You’ll examine the physical phenomenon of each sensor, together with measurement reliability, accuracy, frequency, signal noise, and more.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Patrick Geoghegan
Clean 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: Jack Istok Majors Explored: Civil, Architectural, Ecological, Environmental
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: Sean Gestson Majors Explored: Civil, Architectural, Ecological, Environmental
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: Matt Shuman Majors Explored: Electrical, Computer, Mechanical, Chemical
Inclusive Engineering and Strategic Planning: It Takes All Kinds of Minds
Learn about problem identification and definition, idea generation, team building, experimental design, and resource allocation. Explore inclusive professionalism, approaches to monitor and control complex systems. Learn implementation techniques crucial to push technology forward ethically in a globalized world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Ingrid Scheel Majors Explored: Electrical, Computer, Industrial, Optics
Our Energy Future: Design, Sustainability, and Society
Explore emerging and green energy technologies we need to achieve climate change resiliency through engineering design principles, sustainability considerations, and societal impacts.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Natasha Mallette Majors Explored: Nuclear, Chemical, Electrical, Environmental
Designing Systems for a Better World
Explore the design and engineering of systems — involving people, technology, energy, and information — that play a key role in building and maintaining a better world.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Paula de Szoeke Majors Explored: Industrial, Manufacturing, Mechanical
Soft Skills for Engineers
Develop problem-solving and collaborative decision-making skills, including technical writing and distributed team strategies. Incorporate principles of design including requirement identification, risk analysis, inclusivity, and product verification and validation. Apply computational thinking to solution design using a variety of engineering tools.
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Hannah Scott Majors Explored: Electrical, Computer, Computer Science
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: Andy Dong
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.
Campus: Cascades Instructor: Yong Bakos Majors Explored: Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Others
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 Majors Explored: Electrical, Mechanical, Energy Systems, Engineering Science, Computer Science
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
Spring 2022
Efficiency in Human Systems and the Role Engineers Play in Improvement
Explore how human-made processes and systems can be improved and what role all types of engineers play in the improvement of those systems.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Joe Agor
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
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
Computational Engineering for renewable energy.
Explore the world of renewable energy through data analysis and Python programming. You’ll gain core programming and data analysis skills through project-based learning, reverse engineering of code examples, and design of new programs with applications in renewable energy. Programming language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Liney Arnadottir
Computational Engineering with Nature for Climate Resilience
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 riverine and coastal resiliency problems using computation. Programming language: Python.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Meagan Wengrove
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
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
Smarter World: Internet of Things
Master some core programming concepts with hands-on experiments using electronics and webpages. Focus on creating, not just learning. Programming languages: C and PHP.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Don Heer
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
Analyzing Systems for a Better World
Explore systems that involve people, technology, energy, and information, and discover the computational concepts and algorithmic thinking needed when solving problems for these systems. Programming language: Python
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Paula de Szoeke
Computational Engineering for One Planet
Wrap your brain around some 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, solving sustainability problems using computation. Programming language: Python.
Campus: Corvallis Instructor: Natasha Mallette
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Campus: Corvallis Instructor: TBD
Hack the Planet: Introduction to Software Engineering
Learn how to code together, with no prior experience required. Bring creative ideas to life and solve problems together with fun programming languages, exciting tools, and playful graphics, media, and data. Write programs with JavaScript, SQL, Python, or Ruby.
Campus: Cascades Instructor: Yong Bakos (lead)
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Campus: Cascades Instructor: Becca Webb
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. Programming language:
Campus: Ecampus Instructor: Tim Alcon
Events
Throughout the year, Engineering+ offers events and activities on subjects like career exploration, professional development, community-building, and connecting with alumni and industry — all designed to complement your coursework and help you thrive. All engineering students of all years and majors, including first-year students, are highly encouraged to attend these events.
People
We are here to help. Reach out with any questions or to learn more.
Brett Jeter
Assistant Dean of Academic Programs
brett.jeter@oregonstate.edu
541.737.8765
