Spring Semester - Entertainment Engineering

Entertainment Engineering

24-384/24-789

This elective course is aimed at introducing Mechanical Engineers to the Entertainment industry—where they may find exciting employment opportunities.

This is achieved by first making them aware of the big issues in Entertainment, like “it’s a business,” and “the total guest experience is what matters”. The rest of the in-class time is spent looking at where MechE is used in the industry, including doing some solid MechE problems to show them that the things they have been learning are applicable.

To tie everything together, and to expose them to a “total guest experience,” we have a semester-long project to design, create, present, and strike a Spring Carnival Midway Booth—a little one (“Blitz” booth).

The class is made “with permission of instructor” for two reasons:

• to insure that only people with a real interest in the course take it. I do not want MechEs who have simply thrown darts at a course listing and hit this one.

• to limit MechE participation to seniors and grad students. I do not believe juniors have been sufficiently exposed to all of the MechE subjects involved. On the other hand, a junior who had, for example, interned at Walt Disney World Ride & Show Engineering would be accepted.

Each semester so far we have had one or two ETC students and one or two Drama production majors. They have really added to the class experience, so I would like to recruit similar students for the Spring 2006 semester class. Most of the class work is done in four-person teams. To insure that the non-MechEs do not get “hung out to dry,” I spread them around the teams so that they work alongside the MechEs.

John Wesner

jwesner@andrew.cmu.edu

x82507

HBH 1211