College of Engineering
Rowan University
201 Mullica Hill Road
Glassboro, NJ 08028-1701
Course Coordinator: Anthony Marchese

Week 2 Laboratory
Team Selection for Engineering Design Project

1. Requirements for Team Selection

For the first 7 weeks of the semester, you will be part of a conceptual design team for the portable bridge project.  You will be allowed to try to select your own project teams.  The requirements are:

• Teams cannot have more than 4 members, and
• all team members must be in the same writing section as you.

Each conceptual design team will compete in developing a proposal for their own original bridge design.  The selected design will be built by the entire class during the second 7 weeks of the semester.

A Note on Competition

The best athlete wants his opponent at his best.
The best general enters the mind of his enemy.
The best businessman serves the communal good.
The best leader follows the will of the people.

All of them embody the virtue of non-competition.
Not that they do not love to compete, but they do it in the spirit of play.
In this they are like children and in harmony with the Tao.

Tao Te Ching
Lao-Tzu, 600 BC

2. Team and Personal Web Page Design

To create your personal web page:

1. Open up WindowsNT explorer.

2. Create a directory called www in your personal area on galaxy.  For example, if your last name is Smith and the last 4 digits of your social security number are 1234, you should have an account on galaxy called ~smit1234.

3. Open up Netscape Communicator and load a web page template by clicking below.

4.  In the tool bar menu, Click on File, Edit Page.  This should open up another Netscape Composer window, which can be edited.

5.  To save the results, Click on File, Save As.  Save the file in the directory ~smit1234/www/.  The file name must be index.html.  This is now your home page!   The web address is:  http://engineering.rowan.edu/~smit1234

6.  To create your company web page, just save other files in .html format in the same www directory on galaxy.  For example, if you create a file called company.html, the web address will be: http://engineering.rowan.edu/~smit1234/company.html.

3. Intellectual Property Search

One of the first steps in embarking on an original design is to examine, in detail the current state of Intellectual Property relating to that product.

Our legal system has created the concept of intellectual property to encourage the creation of  valuable ideas, and to protect them from being stolen.  The four main classes of intellectual property are as follows (from the Lemelson Foundation, Handbook for Inventors):

Patents.  A patent is a grant issued by the federal government giving an inventor the right to exclude others from making, using or selling an invention in the United States.  A patent, however, does not necessarily guarantee inventors the right to make, use or sell their own inventions.  In some cases, using a patented invention depends on another person's prior, unexpired patent.  Violating patent rights is known as infringement and can be litigated.

Patent search engines.

IBM Patent Server
US Patent Office

Copyrights.  A copyright is a right that protects published and unpublished works such as literary, dramatic, musical, dance, films, etc. and computer programs from being copied.  Copyrights protect the expression of ideas and not the ideas themselves.  They give their owners (who may or may not be the authors) exclusive rights to reproduce the copyrighted material.

Trade Secrets.  A trade secret is a formula, pattern, manufacturing process, method of doing business, or technical know-how that gives it's holder competitive advantage.  Trade secrets cover a wide spectrum of information, including chemical compounds, machine patterns and customer lists.  An example is the formula for Coca-Cola.

The following are intellectual property links provided by the Lemelson Foundation.