Re-engineering Aerodynamics Education

Aerodynamics curriculum in undergraduate engineering has reached a critical juncture forcing the need for change in the traditional, largely theoretical curriculum and lecturer/listener pedagogy. The role of aerodynamics in aerospace engineering, while still important, is no longer the dominant driver in aircraft design. Furthermore, industry, government, and academia --the likely employers of aerospace graduates --desire a workforce which is the more holistic and systems-thinking as opposed to the highly specialized, research-oriented engineer of past generations. Simultaneously, modern aerodynamics has been revolutionized by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) while our undergraduate curriculum has largely neglected its use. Advances in the pedagogy of technical learning have also occurred which offer the potential to greatly improve the effectiveness of our teaching. In this paper, we report on a four year effort to re-engineer our aerodynamics education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, we discuss (1) the use of a semester-long aerodynamic design project to provide educational motivation and authentic learning experiences, (2) the application of active learning to improve student classroom engagement and student-faculty interaction, and (3) the integration of theoretical, experimental, and computational techniques into a modern aerodynamics curriculum. A variety of data are presented demonstrating improvements in student learning.