• Transitioned from traditional "how to" procedural labs to problem solving, objective oriented labs.
• Revised and rearranged all labs to better facilitate the "transition".
• Wrote a totally new capstone lab. The only totally hands-on lab in the ME department at that time.
• Wrote alternative versions of existing labs to better illustrate engineering concepts covered in those particular labs.
• Transitioned some labs away from using "permanent" test specimens to "destroyable" specimens where observing ultimate failure of materials was part of the learning experience.
• Implemented a one-page memorandum format to replace a more confusing "informal" report format.
• Attempted to make all labs TA-independent by writing detailed lectures, instructions, hidden objectives, and all necessary details needed to teach the labs.
• Kept statistics on prerequisite/corequisite courses and instructors. Lab instructions were adjusted to maximize students learning experience. Number of students taking the lab in a particular term could be predicted by the instructor of the corequisite course.

1. Material Degradation. A warm up lab where students were "deprogrammed" from considering material properties as constant and non-changing. Illustration of how material strength changed due to external influences, e.g., loads, environment, etc. Refresher on data reduction and presentation.
2. Composite Materials. Experimental laboratory where students learned the procedures needed to determine material properties of materials (carbon fiber composites). An introduction to strain measurement using strain gages.
3. Impact Loading. Non-quasi static loading condition and temperature affect on materials. Two versions of this lab were offered, traditional impact and instrumented impact. Instrumented impact lab was a new lab version written to show explicitly how properties such as modulus and yield strength changed with different loading rates.
4. Fracture Toughness. An objective driven lab. Students were given an assignment to analyze an object using fracture mechanic approach. They had to perform the lab to obtain the properties necessary for their analysis. Two versions of the lab were written, an ASTM based and a variable specimen size version. The latter version was written to illustrate the effect of plain strain vs. plain stress. It also offered a more fundamental means of determining fracture properties when "standard" testing method would not produce usable result.
5. Fatigue Crack Growth. Another objective driven lab. Students were given an assignment to analyze the safe service life of an object. They had to perform a fatigue crack growth experiment to obtain the fatigue data necessary for their analysis. Tests were conducted according to ASTM standard.
6. Pressure Vessel. A capstone lab. First lab and, at that time, the only totally hands on laboratory in ME department. Students were assigned a task of measuring internal pressure of a pressure vessel.

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