Through our research of sports engineering, we were able to ascertain the concepts that we deemed most important for students to learn. The stated objectives of the sports engineering course are for students to:
- Define the relationship between sports and engineering
- Describe the importance of ethics within both sports and manufacturing
- Identify technologies and sustainable solutions to manufacturing apparel
- Assess and understand the manufacturing techniques within two companies
- Relate the non-engineering sports world to the knowledge and technologies that engineering has developed.
The course objectives that we have devised come from a list of resources that we will require students to obtain for their participation in the course. The advantage of having an interim course rather than a semester long course is that it presents the opportunity to work hand in hand with the sports teams that are on campus at the time.
We met these course objectives by developing a three-week an informational-segmented course syllabus outlining every day of the course for the full fifteen days of the interim period. The syllabus identifies the course objectives that we have created and effectively assigns a topic to each day throughout the course. The syllabus contains required and optional readings, three essay prompts, and educational field trips.
The idea for this course is not entirely our own. A similar course exists at University of Colorado Denver, called Introduction to Sports Engineering. The course in place at UCD was first offered in the spring of 2010 as a team taught class looking at all three aspects of sports engineering – classical engineering, sports science and medicine, and product design. Through the success of this project, University of Colorado Denver has taken it even further to implement an entire major dedicated to sports engineering.