The IPT Program at UAHuntsville: An Innovative Approach to Design Education and STEM Outreach

This paper will review the Integrated Product Team (IPT) program at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. The core of the IPT program is a multi-disciplinary, multi-university senior design experience. This design experience involves students from engineering and non-engineering departments at UAHuntsville as well as engineering and science students from four U. S. universities and two European universities. This year the program has been expanded to include eight area high schools as part of a new outreach initiative called the Innovative Student Project for Increased Recruitment of Engineering and Science Students (InSPIRESS). The goal of the this initiative is to expand the UAHuntsville Integrated Product Team (IPT) program into area high schools in order to help them develop a better understanding of the purpose of science and mathematics education by providing the opportunity to design a payload for a spacecraft designed by the UAHuntsville senior design experience. This initiative exposes high school students to the systems engineering design and integration process over the course of the academic year. This year over 250 high school and college students are involved in the IPT program. The overarching goal of the program is to provide a broad impact across the spectrum of the educational system by establishing the foundation for a highly integrated design program that links undergraduate education and high school education. All of the participants (i.e., faculty advisors, undergraduate students, high school students, and high school teachers) gain experience in the design of a large scale system and a better understanding of the role of various disciplines in that process. A parallel goal is to encourage more high school students to pursue careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) related fields.