Just-In-Time Implementation of Open-Ended Take-Home Miniature Design Engineering Projects (original) (raw)
Related papers
Implementing Mini Design Projects to Maximize the Quality of Design-Build Term Project Student Work
Volume 5: 13th Design for Manufacturability and the Lifecycle Conference; 5th Symposium on International Design and Design Education; 10th International Conference on Advanced Vehicle and Tire Technologies, 2008
Project-based learning is a widely adopted strategy and a preferred pedagogical tool in the undergraduate engineering curriculum. However, design-and-build engineering projects are open-ended, ill-defined, and quite complex so that students often feel quite overwhelmed by the imposed need to solve relatively challenging and practical problems within limited time and resources. Although there are virtually no right or wrong feasible design engineering project solutions, over the years, students' design project submissions identify a number of students with mediocre design competencies. This indicates that there is a need for developing a pedagogical strategy designed for assisting the students in better preparing for undertaking the challenges of term design engineering projects. Hence, a special series of deliberately designed small-scale "mini" design projects has been developed to serve as "just-intime" means for building-up the students' skills required to successfully undertake the tasks of the respective larger-scale term design projects. This paper focuses on exploring this strategy and the different ways of its implementation into the engineering curriculum through three representative core design courses at the beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, respectively.
Examples of Free Choice Open-Ended Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Course
2017
This complete evidence-based practice paper investigates the implementation of a pilot section with free-choice in selecting an open-ended design project for the NYU Tandon School of Engineering first-year Introduction to Engineering and Design course. This pilot section has been offered for both Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 semesters. The faculty for this 3 credit hour firstyear course are developing an advanced project for students who want a challenge beyond the current options. There are three different project choices that focus on either Lego Mindstorms, LabVIEW, or AutoCAD for all course sections. The same topics are addressed in each project: programming fundamentals, technical drawings, the engineering design process, teamwork, and project management. This new project focuses on the same learning objectives, but it also allows students to take ownership of their design project by generating their own idea. The project combines entrepreneurial thinking and maker technology to a...
A Class Project Experience in a Sophomore-Level Design and Manufacturing Course
2006 GSW Proceedings
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has been hailed in education literature as the epitome of active learning 1-4. Driven with this conviction, the authors introduced a hands-on, plus computer, project in a sophomore-level design and manufacturing course. Here, the authors present their experience with this Problem-Based Learning experiment. They provide an evaluation of the educational experiment and any lessons learned or future recommendations. Depending on available resources, interested design and/or manufacturing teachers can adapt a similar project description for their own courses.
Incorporating Real-Life Open-Ended Design Projects In A First Year Design Course
At Memorial University, for the last several years, instructors of the first-year engineering design course have worked closely with the local chapter of the Tetra Society of North America to provide meaningful openended doable design projects that are needed by actual clients. Founded in 1987, The Tetra Society of North America is an independent non-profit charitable organization that recruits skilled technical volunteers to design and fabricate custom assistive devices for people with disabilities. In this paper, several projects that have been assigned to students in the past will be described and example solutions provided by students will also be shown. From the feedback of students, instructors, and clients, this collaboration with the Tetra Society has been very successful in providing real, needed, doable projects, with real clients for first year engineering students.
A new course in Engineering Design and Innovation used a project-based learning approach to facilitate learning the design process, the development of design thinking and the skills required to solve open-ended design problems. The course involved over 950 first year students, in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Students were enrolled in nine schools of engineering in the faculty. A WebCT Vista course was used to support student learning in design teams and to integrate and manage the course. Online facilitation methods were used to support student learning during several phases of the design process. Online peer assessment and review processes were used to encourage reflective learning and be time-efficient for academic staff. The paper includes survey data from the first offering of the course.
Engineering Design Thinking, Teaching, and Learning
Journal of Engineering Education, 2005
This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning.
Educational design and online support for an innovative project-based course in engineering design
… of the 23rd annual conference of the …, 2006
A new course in Engineering Design and Innovation used a project-based learning approach to facilitate learning the design process, the development of design thinking and the skills required to solve open-ended design problems. The course involved over 950 first year students, in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Students were enrolled in nine schools of engineering in the faculty. A WebCT Vista course was used to support student learning in design teams and to integrate and manage the course. Online facilitation methods were used to support student learning during several phases of the design process. Online peer assessment and review processes were used to encourage reflective learning and be time-efficient for academic staff. The paper includes survey data from the first offering of the course.
Design-Build Project Approach in a First Year Engineering Design Course
We found that first-year engineering students often have difficulties to visualize and manipulate three-dimensional objects mentally, especially if the assembly involves multiple parts that need to work together in sequence to produce a required function. Ultimately, this lack of ability leads to poor representation of intended students' design concepts in paper sketches, as well as poor or unacceptable detailed designs in CAD. Therefore, it is imperative that students develop their ability to manipulate complex objects in space very early in their academic careers. In this context, this paper focuses on the introduction and implementation of a challenging design-build project in the first-year engineering design course at UOIT intended to provide students with early opportunities to physically realize the spatial relationships and the three dimensional causality of the interaction of moving parts in an assembly.
Engineering design educational model: From skills to objectives
2011
The objective of this thesis is to develop an engineering design educational pedagogy on how to improve the engineering design learning experience. The design engineering activity is a complex mix of skills and knowledge that has been taught over decades by directly delivering to the students the design methodologies developed by design researchers and by exposing the students to open ended projects that could develop their design skills. Understanding this we can conclude that the three main pedagogical components of a successful educational design experience are: the design skills, the design methods and the design projects. On one hand, the individual design skills must be properly developed in the student prior to the project experience, making it an overwhelming challenge. On the other hand the design methodologies can be difficult to implement didactically (i.e. teaching techniques), therefore the student struggles to learn, and even more importantly, to embrace such methodologies. We present an approach to design engineering teaching through seven main steps: First, define the desired skills to be acquired by the student during the learning process. Second, from the vast world of design research, select the proper design theories and methodologies that fulfill all the previous requirements of skills. Third, organize the knowledge and skills to be acquired in complexity levels. Fourth, generate educational objectives for each of the knowledge and skills. Fifth, based on educational theories (teaching styles, learning styles, etc.), transform the design skills and methodologies to didactic tasks (lectures, problems, exams, etc.) in such a way that the student will be able to develop their skills and, learn and embrace such methodologies. Sixth, implement the tasks individually along the curriculum as close ended design experiences. Seventh, expose the student to open ended multidisciplinary senior design projects to integrate all the educational design experience components. This model could serve initially as a diagnostic tool to characterize the current set of skills of a given design course or program. The model can also be used to implement educational tasks into the classroom and labs depending on the desired student profile. vii
Redesign of a Toy Project for First Year Engineering Courses
2011
Many students decide to study engineering because they like to design and build things or they like the hands-on work. However, most of the engineering programs devote the first two years of the engineering curriculum to theoretical foundations in math and science with little or no connection with the engineering majors. As a result, a big number of students are stepping out of engineering due to a lack of design and hands on experience during the first two years. This paper reports the implementation of a redesign project in two freshman engineering courses. The purpose of this project is not only to introduce the design process and professional skills such as teamwork and communication among others, but also to serve as a means to connect the students with the engineering field from the very beginning and motivate them to stay in a technical career.