Thompson Centre Course Responsibilities

Introduction to the principles and practices of professional engineering. The design studio fosters innovative thinking, improves problem-solving, and provides context. Includes elements of need recognition, conceptualization, prototyping, and engineering design to satisfy commercial specifications. Emphasis on creativity, teamwork, communication and engineering skills necessary to practice in any engineering discipline.

Course Outline

This course targets the essential aspects of building technology-based businesses and how to identify technology innovation capability for use within existing businesses or new start-ups. Students analyze the firm's goals, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities leading to reasonable marketing strategies and action plans. Students learn to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.

Course Outline

The course is intended to reveal and develop project management best practices. The student will learn the industrially accepted techniques associated with the management of time, cost, and scope in order to achieve total project stakeholder satisfaction. The expected outcome will be to prepare students when pursuing the designation PMP.

Course Outline

This course addresses unique challenges that require engineer leaders - at intra/interpersonal levels, in engineering organizations, in industry ecosystem and in the current discourses and norms of technology culture. Students will develop reflective analyses, case study presentations, engineering philosophy statement and inquiry on their topics of choice, and generate collective insights. 

Related: In 2023 Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association Conference

Course Outline

This course will cover professionalism, ethical theory, the code of ethics and enforcement; the environment; and contracts and risk.

Related: In 2025 World Engineering Education Forum - Global Engineering Deans Council (specific link to paper forthcoming)

Course Outline

This course introduces the concepts and general principles of risk analysis assessment and management in engineering systems. The course discusses the qualitative risk identification methods and the quantitative risk assessment methods and techniques. All this through the lens of different Engineering fields. This will be a case-based learning course.

Course Outline

Introduction to classical system engineering and associated methods, tools and practices, with application experienced through team-based, interdisciplinary design projects. Students build life-long learning skills while working in self-directed teams to gain knowledge across topics that include the System Engineering V-model, human-centered design, modeling and optimization, Design for X, sustainability, risk management and human decision making.

Course Outline

This course is designed to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to engineering research, with the intent of encouraging them to continue to graduate school. Individual students are paired with a single instructor and provided with a range of research projects to choose from based on their shared interests. The projects are scaled so that they can be completed by a single student within a term of hard work, with the intent to publish at the end. The student and instructor collaborate to develop a specific project outline. Students start with a literature review, a basic outline of research attack and methodology, do the experiment or simulation and then write it up with the assistance of the instructor. Weekly meetings with the instructor provide guidance. By the end the course, students will have gained an understanding of how engineering research is conducted, and it is expected that most will be able to publish the results of their work. IE 4490A/B may be taken in any term and may be repeated for credit as IE 4491A/B, with the approval of the instructor and the undergraduate chair for the student’s engineering program.

Course Outline

This is the capstone design course for Integrated Engineering students, and other Western Engineering students who may have an entrepreneurial design project to pursue. Students demonstrate their competencies in integrated engineering systems of two or more disciplines, with a defensible business case for the design. Students will develop reports, communication materials, and prototypes as they complete all phases of the design process, including: problem definition, generation and evaluation of concepts, engineering analysis and testing, and preparation of design documentation. Project management and communications skills will also be emphasized.

Course Outline