In part under the generous support of the NASA Oregon Space Grant Consortium, PSU Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering offers a Jr./Sr. level design course to scheme, design, build and launch such balloon payloads. It is formally called ME406 LaunchPSU (LPSU) and can be taken for up to 4 credits. There are certainly technical course requirements, but this is fun enough that we conduct launches for other educational institutions, and plenty of non-engineering, even non-PSU, people have become involved. This site gives a fair overview of what we have accomplished to date...