The Sooner Lunar Schooner: Lunar Engineering Education

The Sooner Lunar Schooner is a multi-disciplinary ongoing project at the University of Oklahoma to plan, design, prototype, cost and (when funds become available) build/contract and fly a robotic mission to the Moon. The goal of the flight will be to explore a small section of the Moon; conduct a materials analysis of the materials left there by an Apollo mission thirty years earlier; and to perform a selenographic survey of areas that were too distant or considered too dangerous to be done by the Apollo crew. The goal of the Sooner Lunar Schooner Project is to improve the science and engineering educations of the hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students working on the project. The participants, while primarily from engineering and physics, will also include representatives from business, art, journalism, law and education. This project ties together numerous existing research programs at the University, and provides a framework for the creation of many new research proposals. The authors were excited and motivated by the Apollo missions to the Moon. When we asked what we could do to similarly motivate students we realized that nothing is as exciting as going to the Moon. The students seem to agree. MOTIVATION FOR MULTIDISCIPLINARY ENGINEERING PROJECTS With the exception of a few labs and a semester capstone class, the majority of engineering classes are still taught in a traditional lecture format. This format of education is sufficient for many students, but is by no means compatible with all students’ learning styles. In fields such as engineering, a traditional lecture format fails to give students a realistic feel as to what most working engineers actually do. Working engineers who manage to avoid management chores spend a large portion of their time working on projects. Often times this work involves actual hands-on time with hardware or software, or with the production process. The traditional lecture format of education fails to give proportional time to these activities. Because of this, students are not as prepared for actual engineering work as they are for taking engineering exams. More importantly, for many students, a traditional engineering education lacks the attraction of actual engineering work. As a result, many engineering students switch majors or drop out of the program because their educational experiences did not match with their expectations of what it was to do engineering. Sometimes this is due to misguided expectations, but often the students’ expectations are correct, and their disappointment is due to an actual disconnect between the educational and the engineering processes. In 1998, the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma (OU) started a study to explore making their curricula more project-based, in order to address the concerns above (Shirley et al. 2002). Project based or experience based engineering is widely recognized as a preferred method for not only interesting students in engineering, but in improving their learning (Kolb 1984, Smith 2000). Several options were explored including adding several projectbased courses and even a project track for the various majors. The different options all required projects with the following characteristics: 1. Multi-year duration 2. Students could participate at all levels of university education 3. Projects involved multiple disciplines 4. Students could move through the project as their education progressed 5. Projects would attract and engage students 6. Projects would be able to attract funding and become self supporting 7. Projects would advance the research interests and reputation of OU. The Sooner Lunar Schooner (SLS) project was initiated to address these educational goals and requirements1. The SLS is being implemented as a flexible series of courses, capstone projects, and research directions that are synergistically linked and build upon one another. For the moment, all elements of SLS are in the OU College of Engineering. The authors are currently working with members of the College of Arts and Sciences in order to get appropriate projects in Physics & Astronomy, Business, Law, Journalism, etc. underway as well.