Human-Centered Support of Education in Design Problem Solving

Over the last several years, the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES), from its origins as the Engineering Design Research Center (EDRC), has evolved two elective courses addressing the social and group aspects of engineering design. These courses are offered to students in the engineering undergraduate curricula as part of a design minor. The importance of these courses can be understood in light of the statement in the Report by the National Academy of Engineering on "Engineering as a Social Enterprise" that less than 2% of the population of the United States are engineers . The social impact of engineers on the day-to-day lives of ordinary people is immense, and creating an awareness of their impact on society has been rather sparse in current engineering education. The two courses taught at ICES are distinct in character in that they address social and group work issues at two different levels: a course on formulating engineering problems and a product design course that has industrial partners as clients. The first course is open only to engineering majors, while the second course is open to all students on campus. In the fall of 2000 we extended the first course to be a cross Atlantic joint course taught simultaneously at both TU Delft in the Netherlands and CMU. The primary goal of the problem formulation course has been to emphasize the importance of negotiations and tradeoffs among the stakeholders in the formulation of any design problem. Further, we emphasize the need for a precise articulation of the problem to serve as a contractual agreement among the stakeholders.

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

(ASU). She currently works as a graduate research associate in the Communication in Science Inquiry Project, an NSF-funded teacher professional development program. She earned her master's degree in Science Education at ASU. She has a BS degree in Physics Education and is currently pursuing another B.S.E degree with a concentration in mechanical systems. In 2007, she received the Dean's Excellence award in graduate research from the Mary Lou Fulton School of Education. Her creative research focuses on team learning and the role of self-efficacy on student achievement.

INCOSE International Symposium, 2018

Future Female Leaders in Engineering (FFLIE) Program participants at Los Alamos National Laboratory were tasked to provide a design solution that would help the Bradbury Science Museum meet its educational outreach mission, using the principles and practices of Design Thinking (DT). The DT project aimed to improve the students’ skills in the areas of project planning, problem definition, qualitative data collection and organization, problem solving, and product life cycle planning to prepare them for leadership roles on future technical projects. The instructional content used in the program is summarized at the outset of each section of the paper. How the students implemented the phases of Design Thinking and the resulting products are also described, using excerpts from the final project report they prepared. Throughout the project, the design team learned how to effectively brainstorm, communicate with others, gather needed information through interviews, analyze the information,...

2007

The primary aim of teaching design for mechanical engineering students is to enable the students to achieve a fundamental level of competence in design. This involves creating appropriate learning environment for the students to develop concepts, creativity and critical thinking skills. It is also necessary for the students to develop both individual and team based skills. This paper looks at the student responses based on individual and team based tasks in a second year design course. The student surveys indicate very strong support for team based projects, with a high proportion of students agreeing that they gained many learning benefits as a result: importance of simple design, practical experience of design, and importance of organisation, skills in problem solving and how to work in a team. Overall, the student feedback indicates that they have to work individually to understand the concepts and collectively on a project to achieve a high level outcome.

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

Throughout their education, engineering design students not only learn the design process, but also form and refine their conception of engineering design. Building on the results from a study of practicing engineers' conceptions of design, we present survey results from engineering students enrolled in Mechanical Engineering 110 (n=51), an upper-division human-centered design course. We compare the students' initial conceptions of design from before the course to those after the course. In particular, we look at how the course affects their perceived importance of specific design skills, and their level of agreement with a series of statements on the nature of design. We also compare the students' conceptions of design after the course to those of practicing engineers from a previous study. The upper division engineering students showed a remarkable similarity to the results of the practicing engineers with a few notable exceptions. Our results show that after the class, more engineering students identified synthesis as among the more important skills, and brainstorming as among the less important skills than before the class. Although the upper division engineering students before the course agreed with the practicing engineers in the idea that design is solution-led, this perception changed after taking the human-centered design course which emphasizes the importance of user research in the design process.

2004

A new engineering curriculum was introduced at K.U.Leuven together with the transition to the bachelor-master system. The students take a new course 'Problem Solving and Engineering Design' to introduce them from the first semester onwards into real engineering practice and teamwork. Throughout the three semesters of the first phase of the bachelor, a gradual transition from solving closed engineering problems to working on open-end design projects is implemented. The teamwork is much more coached and monitored in the first semester than in the third semester. The new course was introduced in September 2003 and was taken by all 420 freshman engineering students. Formal student feedback was obtained at the end of the first semester. The overall feedback was very positive. Only few student teams had to be catalogued as performing rather poorly. The vast majority of the students appreciated this new course and commented that they had learned more in a team than when they had to do the same tasks alone. The integration of the team assignments with the other regular courses will be improved before the start of the next academic year.

2011

Engineering design involves insightful identification of factors influencing a system and systematic unpacking of specifications/requirements from goals. However, many engineering students are slow to articulate the major problems to be solved and the sub problems associated with achieving the main design goals and constraints. Prior research in design describes students" premature termination of solution finding to select a single idea. Then all other design decisions are constrained by this initial decision [1]. In this paper, we report how first-year engineering (FYE) students attempted to translate given design goals into sub-problems to be solved or questions to be researched. We found that, instead of decomposing the problem through further analysis and sense making, many FYE students tended to "restate" the goal, identify one major function, and then use hands on building as the central creative process. Further, students claimed they used a systematic design process, but observations of their problem solving process and teaming skills indicated a different behavior. Further investigation indicated that many FYE students could identify the superficial features from the problem statement, but they were not able to identify the implicit logical steps or deep structure of the problem. Our current data provided the baseline of how FYE students abstract and interpret information from a design goal to generate a specific problem statement. We are interested in treatments to improve students" ability to recognize critical features of a given context and encourage taking multiple perspectives to identify alternative solutions. We are combining the use of graphical representational tools as organizational tools to support teams collaboration and we encourage opportunities to reflect and refine their design process. This research is relevant to engineering instructors/researchers who want to develop students" ability to deal with complex design challenges and efficiently decompose, analyze and translate the problem statements into meaningful functional specifications, stakeholder requirements and a plan of action.

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

Engineering design involves insightful identification of factors influencing a system and systematic unpacking of specifications/requirements from goals. However, many engineering students are slow to articulate the major problems to be solved and the sub problems associated with achieving the main design goals and constraints. Prior research in design describes students" premature termination of solution finding to select a single idea. Then all other design decisions are constrained by this initial decision [1]. In this paper, we report how first-year engineering (FYE) students attempted to translate given design goals into sub-problems to be solved or questions to be researched. We found that, instead of decomposing the problem through further analysis and sense making, many FYE students tended to "restate" the goal, identify one major function, and then use hands on building as the central creative process. Further, students claimed they used a systematic design process, but observations of their problem solving process and teaming skills indicated a different behavior. Further investigation indicated that many FYE students could identify the superficial features from the problem statement, but they were not able to identify the implicit logical steps or deep structure of the problem. Our current data provided the baseline of how FYE students abstract and interpret information from a design goal to generate a specific problem statement. We are interested in treatments to improve students" ability to recognize critical features of a given context and encourage taking multiple perspectives to identify alternative solutions. We are combining the use of graphical representational tools as organizational tools to support teams collaboration and we encourage opportunities to reflect and refine their design process. This research is relevant to engineering instructors/researchers who want to develop students" ability to deal with complex design challenges and efficiently decompose, analyze and translate the problem statements into meaningful functional specifications, stakeholder requirements and a plan of action.

2004

This paper aims to define a framework for the teaching and learning of undergraduate students in mechanical design. Training students in mechanical engineering design involves teaching both design methods and tools, and their usage in projects. Students should then consider and apply these methods and tools in product design projects. The paper is developed as follow. The relevant part of the curriculum of the mechanical engineering and design department of the Technological University of Grenoble (INPG) is first described and particularly the key element, the engineering project, is presented. A theoretical framework based on the instrument concept is then described. This framework is applied to observed design project situations to analyse practices and finally to propose new training situations enabling students to better use taught methods and tools to design efficiently.