This sounds fantastic.
Great!
In what context would the students be creating the notebooks -- as part of one of your existing ME courses, as a for-credit project, as a supervised but non-credit project?
These would be supervised projects either for work-study or credit.
What were your thoughts on submission workflow? You review initially, then the student directly submits a PR?
My plan was to mentor the initial idea and creation and help the students submit PRs. For most, this will be their first interaction with Github.
Suppose several students want to create a notebook on the same topic. Would you steer them to another topic, allow them to work independently and both submit (and we merge best of both), urge them to collaborate?
My hope would be students that are passionate about the same topic could collaborate. I've had students collaborate on topic ideas for small projects that worked very well.
Were you planning to keep the mechanical engineering context for these problems, or present abstractly?
I would plan to keep the How-to as an engineering application. It shouldn't detract from the underlying numerical work.