Structuring the design experience

1 INTRODUCTION Design education usually employs project-based learning, in which students learn to research, plan, design and reflect on the creation of technological projects [1], [2]. Student experience issues may influence students' design process, as well as their perception of professional knowledge development. Studies have pointed out students are ill-informed about design education when entering university [3]. In the field of design, although there have been student surveys to analyze design thinking skills and for assessing design literacy. However, these studies are primarily assessment tools, and do not investigate students’ attitudes or experiences of their design courses. While several studies focus on measuring students’ cognitive knowledge, assessments of affective variables, such as attitude, are far fewer in number. The objective of this study was to investigate student experiences, specifically the issues and challenges faced by students in three foundational design courses – focusing on introductory design, architectural design and engineering design – at the . We investigate issues such as how do students experience various instruction modes such as lectures and studio; and their experience of working individually or as teams in the three foundational design courses. 2 METHOD We conducted a survey in three foundational design courses, in both online and paper format. The survey comprised quantitative and qualitative components. Respondents consisted of 248 students from the introductory design course, 48 students from the introductory architectural design course and 71 students from the engineering design course. Respondents rated their perceptions on 23 items in two types of questions: Likert, semantic differential. Additionally, they provided their input in two open-ended questions. 3 RESULTS A principal component analysis conducted on the data revealed five factors that primarily contributed to students’ perception of foundational design courses: (1) the fun aspects of design, (2) the stressful aspects of design, (3) Course Pressures, (4) Student temperament issues, (5) Teamwork experience. Performance pressures majorly affected student experience in all three courses. The architectural design course was seen to be the most enjoyable for students, as fun scores were higher than the stress scores, and low course pressures. The engineering design course was observed to be very stressful for students, with low scores for fun. 4 SIGNIFICANCE Student perception of foundational design courses is important because it can be used to drive forward changes in curriculum and pedagogy. While this study uses data from one university, the issues reported here are generic and relevant for instructors developing design courses across different parts of the world. Research in student experience and perspectives is crucial to develop design education and propel it into the future. REFERENCES [1] Y. Doppelt, “Assessing creative thinking in design-based learning,” International Journal of Technology and Design Education, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 55–65, 2009, [2] N. Lee, “Project methods as the vehicle for learning in undergraduate design education: a typology,” Design Studies, vol. 30, no. 5, pp. 541–560, Sep. 2009, [3] A. B. Gencosmanoglu, “Learning, teaching and administration in design education: DESIGNtrain Project: Training tools for developing design education,” in Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2010.

All the associate degree mechanical engineering technology (2MET) students at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College are required to take a capstone engineering design course during their fourth semester in the two-year degree program.This project-based three credit-hour course is titled "Product Design with Writing Skills" (MET 210W).In this course students are taught design and selection of spur gears, shafts, helical compression springs, chains and sprockets, keys and fasteners, through teambased assignments and mini projects.These activities prepare students for the major design project to be conducted near the

This paper draws on research in both technical communication and education to describe a problem-based learning approach to engineering design courses that more authentically engages students in the practice of communicating with specific audiences for specific purposes. By developing a learner-centered classroom in which faculty serve as mentor-managers rather than repositories of knowledge, instructors can develop communication tasks that more closely reflect the way texts function in the workplace. In doing so, they can better prepare students for role that texts play in professional practice and enable them to make decisions accordingly. The author includes results from pilot sections of capstone engineering design courses to describe the implementation and evaluate the effectiveness of the approach.

This work reviews best practices in first-year engineering design courses at 40 universities across Canada and the United States. The authors reviewed the subject matter and instructional methods of these engineering design courses. University selection was based on prominence, level of engineering design content, and availability of data. The authors narrowed the scope of the study to seven Canadian programs and eight American programs for further investigation: University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, University of Manitoba, Queen’s University, University of Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, University of Colorado, Franklin W. Olin Engineering College, Harvey Mudd College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute. The authors then identified six reoccurring themes in the methods of engineering design instruction: full-scale project, small-scale project, case study analysis, reverse engineering project, design tools and methods instruction, and integration. These themes are then discussed from the point of view of educators looking to develop first-year engineering design courses.

Assessment in capstone engineering design courses is vital to engineering education programs. The capstone design course is the climax of design education and often the context for much of the assessment done in engineering degree programs. Capstone design course instructors’ admittedly low confidence for assessing student performance in these courses poses a crucial obstacle to the assessment process. A key issue is a lack of clear outcomes definition for engineering design and sound, defensible assessments for these outcomes. This paper draws from findings in design literature and from engineering design education experience to construct a conceptual model of engineering design that guides development of associated design learning outcomes and assessment of student achievements in design. A conceptual model of design is vital to design education, because it is one of three essential cornerstones— model, observation, and interpretation— for constructing assessments. In the context of an engineering classroom, design performance produces two different and complementary types of outcomes: learner development and solution development. Further, design is: open-ended, iterative, creative, collaborative, goal-driven, process-intensive, productfocused, customer-oriented, value-added, and constrained by society. Learner and solution development usually progresses from a state of students’ fragmented understanding and ideas to a more mature state of integrated understanding and design solutions. The proposed conceptual model for engineering design identifies four areas of performance that describe design: (1) personal capacity, (2) team processes, (3) solution requirements, and (4) solution assets. The first two characterize learner development and the latter two characterize solution development. Personal capacity is the designer’s development of skills which support technically sound and responsible design. Team processes address a team’s behaviors and productivity in design activities. Solution requirements address the team’s understanding of stakeholder needs and concerns. Solution assets encompass the value added, practicality, and impact of the design solution. These four performance areas are essential to design. They identify performances that develop over time, contribute to the success of design outcomes, and stimulate growth in one another for integrated enhancement of design performance. They also provide the basis for a versatile, comprehensive definition of engineering design performance that can guide instruction and can focus assessments in capstone engineering design courses.

First year engineering design courses arenow common across Canadian engineering schools.These courses can be challenging to develop and deliver.They are often stuck in the chicken versus egg problem.Can I teach design with no engineering? Can I teachengineering with no design? How does one introducefour years of engineering education and an engineeringcareer in one course? How to do so across many or allengineering disciplines? How to do so in a foundationalmanner? Can it be done in a meaningful way? Can it beengaging and fun? A Teddy Bear Wheel Chair (TBWC)design project is the focal point of Guelph’s first yearengineering design course. The TBWC integratescomputers, mechanics, biomechanics (Teddy Bear style),environment, safety, sustainability, materials, costing,hands-on, perseverance, ethics and DESIGN. The TBWCparticipates in curling, sprinting and scoring goals. Theresult is a challenging and fun competition thatintroduces all of Guelph’s engineering students to theirengineering design careers. This paper and presentationwill share one instructor’s efforts to make all of this work.

BackgroundAs a result of concerns about communication at our engineering school, this study explores the written communication standards that engineering faculty and undergraduate students consider most important.Concerns about communication surfaced in several ways.For example, according to several professors in engineering, students sometimes complain of receiving inconsistent advice about their writing and of being evaluated according to professors' "idiosyncratic" standards.In addition, surveys of alumni show that although they consider communication of the "highest importance," they are not satisfied with the education they received in this area.In general, the engineering faculty at Northwestern believe that their students receive a strong writing education in their freshman year, when they take a required course in Engineering Design and Communication, but lack sufficient follow-up opportunities to improve their writing as sophomores, juniors, and seniors.In particular, several faculty participating in the VaNTH (Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-and Harvard/MIT) Engineering Research Center (www.vanth.org)are concerned about how their innovative efforts to integrate communication instruction into their classes can be promulgated throughout the curriculum.To investigate these problems and gather data to help us improve the teaching of writing throughout the curriculum, our interdisciplinary committee--faculty from engineering, writing, and the learning sciences-collaborated to:

This paper presents the impact that theDesign Engineering and Design (DE&I) program offeredin 2013 has had in the Faculty of Engineering at theUniversity of Victoria. Through this program a pool ofnineteen graduate students were trained as DesignTeaching Assistants (DTAs). The purpose of this programis to train DTAs in engineering design principles andpedagogical skills for mentoring students working ondesign projects. During the year DTAs continued theirtraining by attending seminars presented by guestspeakers. To date, eight DTAs have been appointed toeither assist as qualified Teaching Assistant in alreadyestablished engineering design courses (two DTAs), or todevelop new design projects in courses that are primarilyengineering science (six DTAs). The latter was supportedby the course instructor and the coordinators of thisprogram. The paper describes the development andmanagement of these design projects, their impact onundergraduate students, and the personal experiencegained by the DTAs. Also, the paper presents a review ofthe 2013 DE&I program including a new strategy for theupcoming 2014 DE&I workshops that will focus more onthe development and execution of design projects of theDTAs.

First Year Design courses are commonplace in many engineering curriculums. Although the focus of these courses typically revolves around introducing students to various multistep design processes as well as improving student skills in written and oral communication techniques; they can be limited in replicating the experience of working in a real world interdisciplinary design environment. In an industrial setting, design teams are comprised of members that have the complementary skills that are necessary to complete the relevant task. There are many tools, like CATME, available to replicate this process of designing student teams based on complementary skills. Prior studies have illustrated that, although assigned teams can improve the experience for some, it can also drastically diminish the student experience for others. This work focuses on the assignment of student design teams based on both complementary skills as well as shared interests. As part of the common first year engineering curriculum at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Ma, students participate on the Introduction to Engineering Design course. This work studies two years-worth of data on the impact of assigned groups in these courses, as they pertain to overall student experience. For this, various sections of the course adopted one of the following structures for group assignments: 1) student selected, 2) skills-based instructor assigned, 3) skills and student interest based instructor assigned. Written feedback and peer assessment, based on ABET Outcome D: Ability to function in multidisciplinary teams, were collected from the students. Our analysis focuses on the process of intelligently assigning student groups and the techniques that can improve the overall student experience. The authors hope to engage in a spirited discussion on the merits of assigned student design teams as well as propose an alternative approach for instructors planning to engage students in interdisciplinary project based courses.

The purpose of this work is to examine how project management is perceived in the engineering undergraduate curriculum at the University of Guelph across its four-year series of design courses, and to gather insight into the skills, elements, and level of mastery required. As a Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board graduate attribute, project management is taught in all engineering programs. The instructor perspective is explored through interviews with instructors that have taught engineering design courses. The instructor responses are analyzed for insights related to the effectiveness of the curriculum for the development of project management skills. This work is the first component a larger study that will examine and compare the findings with the views of students and alumni of the program. The results of these interviews aim to provide insight to engineering programs related to the level of mastery expected of graduating students, and future activities to explore for the purpose of closing gaps that might exist between graduate competencies and industry needs to better equip students with the skills of future leaders.

Problem-based learning techniques involving small collaborative teams of students are widely regarded as being effective in teaching engineering design courses. However, the heavy requirements upon the teaching staff to support and coordinate such teams typically limit these courses to small numbers of students. In this paper, we describe the design of a computer-based tool for supporting small collaborative teams with the ultimate goal of scaling these engineering design courses to larger numbers of students. The system, deployed on laptops with wireless networking, utilizes student self-evaluations and instrumented project management tools to provide feedback of individual and team performance to the students and teaching staff. We present an example of the usage and data collected from this system during a pilot test in an undergraduate computer science design course. Based on that experience, we discuss future plans to refine the system for early detection of problem teams and to instrument asynchronous and instant messaging tools to support social network analysis of team communication.

BackgroundEngineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under‐preparing graduates for the real‐world engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project‐based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education and industry remains.Purpose/HypothesisThis study aims to understand how undergraduate engineering students perceive product design before and after an upper‐level project‐based design course, as measured through concept maps. The purpose is to measure whether and how students account for the technical and nontechnical elements of design, as well as how a third‐year design course influences these design perceptions.Design/MethodConcept maps about product design were collected from 105 third‐year engineering students at the beginning and end of a design course. Each concept map's content and structure were quantitatively analyzed to evaluate the students' conceptual understandings and compare them across disciplines in the before and after conditions.ResultsThe analyses report on how student conceptions differ by discipline at the outset and how they changed after taking the course. Mechanical Engineering students showed a decrease in business‐related content and an increased focus on societal content, while students in the Engineering Management and Industrial and Systems Engineering programs showed an increase in business topics, specifically market‐related content.ConclusionThis study reveals how undergraduate students conceptualize product design, and specifically to what extent they consider engineering, business, and societal factors. The design courses were shown to significantly shape student conceptualizations of product design, and they did so in a way that mirrored the topics in the course syllabi. The findings offer insights into the education‐practice skills gap and may help future educators to better prepare engineering students to meet industry needs.

As a follow-up to our previous paper on the successes and limitations of using Rube Goldberg machines in a first year engineering design course, in this paper, we outline how we addressed some of the limitations from our first attempt to use Rube Goldberg machines in our course.As pointed out in our previous paper, the first year engineering curriculums of many engineering programs are heavily loaded with science classes and have very little exposure to engineering.Engineering schools must find ways to introduce students to engineering in a fun, engaging fashion.For the past two years, we have been using Rube Goldberg machines to help achieve this goal.Our first year design and communications course attempts to engage students by challenging them to design and build a working Rube Goldberg machine as part of a group project.By working to achieve specific design goals that are subject to constraints, students get to work on a miniengineering project that is fun, creative, and challenging.The long-term goal of the Rube Goldberg Experiment is twofold: (1) to give first year engineering students a positive engineering design experience in their very first semester and (2) to develop a culture of anticipation in Grade 12 students who might be considering an engineering education at the University of Regina.In this paper, we outline changes made to our approach that address shortcomings identified from our first semester and provide results from student feedback, which demonstrate a positive response to the project.

The purpose of this study is to consider how to use the e-Learning system in the engineering design courses at Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT). The courses consist of two levels: Engineering Design I (ED I) and Engineering Design II (ED II). The former is taken by all freshmen during the second quarter, and the latter is taken by all sophomores during the sixth quarter. KIT's calendar has three 10-week quarters per year. The courses require students to participate in a team project from the problem discovery stage to the concept design stage. As the first e-Learning trial in the engineering design course, we introduce the collaboration-communication function of the e-Learning system to our ED I class. In this paper, we describe the students' activities in each engineering design process in situations where students can use the e-Learning system.

This paper describes a novel format for a proposed Capstone engineering design course that combines industrial experience with international collaboration and uses distance learning as a pedagogical tool. The course is designed for programs in the Industrial Engineering Departments at the University of Pittsburgh and the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Monterrey. The team for the design project has two students from each institution and is conducted at an industrial concern whose location alternates between Mexico and the US each year. Project responsibilities are divided between the two sets of students and a faculty supervisor at each institution works with the two groups which stay in close contact with each other by means of electronic mail, the Internet and distance learning technologies. During the last week of the term, the members of the team at the remote location join their teammates to put the finishing touches on the project and to make the final presentation to the faculty and the industrial client. This paper explains the proposed program in detail.