Heavy metal is one of the most misinterpreted musical genres in existence, while also arguably one of the most intelligent, insightful and technologically-rich genres. Heavy metal's history has facilitated multiple engineering developments in its quest for extremity as well as containing a wealth of commentary about global, social, religious and political cultures. A course has been created to help students explore these engineering developments and social commentary in order to promote understanding of the interplay between the technologies and cultural phenomena. This presentation will provide a synopsis of the course and its success over its developmental period. The course utilizes heavy metal's influences and history to examine where culture and music collide. It then goes further to study the music's relationship with progress in engineering and design. To do this, the course reviews the engineering problem solving process, as well as discipline-specific topics like materials science, electronics, mechanics and manufacturing as they pertain to instrument and equipment design. The course further discusses the impact of software on the creation and distribution of musical media, and the social and legal aspects of the Internet. These topics are then related to the bigger picture of engineering and technology in general society. Student evaluations of this course suggest that combining these seemingly-disparate topics has struck a chord in students, so to speak. In the first three years of the course, the feedback from the more than 200 enrolled students included such comments as "It inspired unique thought processes that helped explore new topics not touched in other classes" and "intellectually in-depth concepts". For the evaluation question "I rate this course as Excellent", the ratings every year were above 3.45 on a scale of 0-4 ("0" meaning "Strongly Disagree" and "4" meaning "Strongly Agree"). This suggests that combining interesting topics for students with far-reaching and often unusual concept combinations is a winning formula for promoting cross-disciplinary understanding and growth in students' critical thinking skills.
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