Lawrence Carlson Introduces Hands-On Learning through Engineering Design Projects

Professor Lawrence Carlson has seen a lot of change in his 35 years of teaching engineering – and much of it he initiated as a CU faculty member.

He began teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971, after earning his master’s and D.Eng. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. His doctoral thesis focused on designing a unique upper-arm prosthesis with coordinated motion patterns, and he continued his focus on rehabilitation engineering in Chicago where he collaborated with the Prosthetics Research Laboratory at Northwestern University.

Carlson was attracted to CU-Boulder in 1974 by an offer to join the Department of Engineering Design and Economic Evaluation, a department bringing together his fundamental interests in design and new product development. Although the department was disbanded four years after he arrived, Carlson was able to move to the Department of Mechanical Engineering and continue to pursue these interests.

“I am fascinated by engineering design and teach courses exclusively in this general area,” Carlson says. His courses include Computer-Aided Design and Fabrication, Innovation and Invention, and Mechanical Engineering Design, a project course in which students work together to design and build a racecar each year to compete in the annual Society of Automotive Engineers’ Formula SAE Race in Michigan.

The CU engineering 2004 Formula SAE team with faculty advisor Larry Carlson at front right.

Carlson also has dedicated significant time to improving engineering education through the introduction of more hands-on learning in the curriculum.  He helped to introduce the college’s First-Year Engineering Projects course, which gives students a hands-on design experience early in their undergraduate degree program, and he worked with other faculty to develop the award-winning Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory, which has been a national model for collaborative, hands-on engineering education. Carlson served as the ITLL’s co-director, along with Jackie Sullivan, from its opening in 1997 until 2007.

“My favorite definition of engineering is ‘building things that benefit society,’” he says. “I try to instill this notion in all my students, and engineering design is an excellent opportunity to do just that.”

Carlson received the college’s Charles Hutchinson Memorial Teaching Award in 2001, was named an IDEO Fellow in 2001, and won the John and Mercedes Peebles Innovation in Education Award in 2004.

Angela Bielefeldt Civil & Environ. David Klaus Bio-astronautics Alan Weimer Chemical Engineering Skip Ellis Computer Science Zoya Popovic Electro-magnetics Larry Carlson Mechanical Engineering