With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to list ways in which Olin's curriculum has changed while I've been here. It turns out that the changes to the first year curriculum alone are quite extensive, so in this post I'll start with those.
The First Year Curriculum
Modeling and Control, Real World Measurements: These courses no longer exist in the form in which I took them. Each one was a three credit course; ModCon was first semester and RWM was second semester. Together, they served as introductions to basic circuit concepts, control, and measurement. These were combined into one four credit course titled Introduction to Sensors, Instrumentation, and Measurement (ISIM).Modeling and Simulation: ModSim's course goals are still the same as they were when I took the class, and the overall structure is still a series of three decreasingly scaffolded projects. The class has gone back and forth on whether all three of these are pair projects, but has settled back to all three of them being done in pairs. The first project has also changed a lot. For my class it was a population dynamics project with suggestions given but a choice about which project to do. The next two years it was the same project looking at the interaction of sharks, rays, and scallops for everyone. This year the portion of the class focused on difference equations was mostly cut, and the first project was focused on pharmacokinetics. (In past years, pharmacokinetics was one of two choices of area for the second project.)
Design Nature: The first half of DesNat, the hopper project, is still pretty much the same. There are some key differences in the second half of the class, though. When I took the class, the second half was a team project called the Transporter Project. Each team built a (usually remote-controlled) toy based on a particular animal and developed a game around that toy in which the animal transported something. That project has been significantly reframed. Each team still has an animal, but the focus is very much on the game and the experience. The transport element is not a requirement, and a lot of games now feature the players of the game acting in the place of the animal. (One fantastic game last semester involved players acting as termites and building a mound.) This has made the second half of the class a bit less technical in some ways, but it seems like the projects come out a lot better and far less contrived.
Mathematics: Linearity I still exists (as does Lin II, taken in fall of sophomore year). We've made a number of changes to details of format to try to improve the class and better guide students through the material while still keeping the class discovery-like. The content of Lin I is pretty stable, though, and most of the changes haven't been fundamental. Lin II has had more significant content changes, though those have been more reflective of teaching team and thus might reverse again this coming fall. Lin II as it was taught over the past couple of years has more optimization and some introductory partial differential equations, spending a bit less time on vector/multivariable calculus depth and linear dynamics. However, there are huge changes going on in Olin's math and physics curriculum. This semester was the launch of Quantitative Engineering Analysis (QEA), previously referred to as The Experiment. The idea is that over two semesters, with each one counting for eight credits, QEA covers the material of Linearity I, Linearity II, Mechanics, Dynamics, and Signals and Systems in an integrated way. This is opt-in because it is an experiment, and it will run at least three times as an experiment. The basic structure of QEA is around a few modules (two-three per semester). The first module was about building a boat that carries a certain load, and this involved some mechanics and dynamics and a fair bit of multivariable calc. The current module is on facial recognition, so it's a more linear algebra and SigSys focused section.
Entrepreneurship Foundation: This wasn't a first year requirement when I took it, and the iteration of the class I took was called The Entrepreneurial Initiative (though we all called it FBE, an older acronym). Now, the E! foundation is required in the second semester of the first year, and the class is called Products and Markets (P&M). P&M has two double-wide blocks per week but is still just a four credit class; the extra time is intended to allow teams to get off campus and get user feedback, I think. It wasn't really a business class when I took it and still isn't, but it's become more and more of a UOCD precursor. This is still a very problematic class. This year's first year class got together and produced a huge document that they then all discussed as a class with the professor, trying to fix the class for this semester (and, with lower priority, trying to provide feedback for future iterations of the course).
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