Modeling as an Engineering Habit of Mind and Practice

2015

How to teach design? This is not the first time that this question is asked and there are probably as many answers as design academic programs in the world. Knowing how to design is not enough to teach someone to do it. There are numerous experiences in this matter profusely published on literature. However, this information is sparse and does not exist in a summarized and comparative way, and knowing how design is taught is crucial to build other design academic programs in the future and enrich the pedagogical practices of the existing ones. Every design program should be based in a conceptual framework in which there are mainly two multidisciplinary fields: design and education. This framework provides a structured and concrete way of improving learning activities in design. In this paper, we will focus on design education identifying, summarizing and comparing its pedagogical practices (PP’s) published in this matter. The first objective is accomplished with a survey of approach...

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Engineers use models to validate the solutions they build. Professors also ask engineering students for functional prototypes, mathematical models, and diagram models that show the functionality of the students' designs. Typically, students' grades are based upon their model outcomes; professors have no knowledge of the start-to-finish details of the process used by the students in modeling and solution. This process includes all of the students' work from the initial problem specification to the moment they hand in their final product. How is it possible to help students during this solution process if that process is not understood? Understanding how students approach problems and how they achieve resolutions is crucial to answering that question. One way to enhance the knowledge about the way engineering students approach problems is related with understanding their use of models. Two questions have been answered in this work to contribute to that understanding:

2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

Design fixation is a major factor that hinders design innovation. When designers fixate, they replicate example features and the ideas from the their past experiences in their designs, creating more redundant designs. Building and testing designs is one potential approach for reducing design fixation. The study presented in this paper investigates the role of building working prototypes and warnings about negative example features in mitigating design fixation in freshmen. Two hypotheses are investigated here: (1) The fixation to undesirable example features can be mitigated by building and testing physical models of the designs; (2) providing suitable warnings to novice designers can help them in avoiding design fixation. These hypotheses are tested using a quasi-experiment conducted during a freshmen class project. Students complete their projects in three different experimental groups. One group receives a fixating example with an undesirable feature. The feature negatively influences the functionality of the design. The second group receives the same fixating example with warnings about the undesirable feature. The third group completes the project without the help of an example (control). Students are instructed to build and test their designs. The designs are photographed before and after testing. The occurrence of the flawed example feature in each design is studied. The results show that providing warnings about the undesirable feature does not mitigate design fixation. Meanwhile, as students build and test their ideas, they identify the flaws and gradually mitigate the fixation. Their final designs, after many cycles of testing, contain significantly fewer flawed features. This shows that building and testing physical models helps students in improving the functionality of their designs. In our engineering classrooms, building and testing skills need to be encouraged in order to nurture a future generation of innovative designers.

How to teach design? This is not the first time that this question is asked and there are probably as many answers as design academic programs in the world. Knowing how to design is not enough to teach someone to do it. There are numerous experiences in this matter profusely published on literature. However, this information is sparse and does not exist in a summarized and comparative way, and knowing how design is taught is crucial to build other design academic programs in the future and enrich the pedagogical practices of the existing ones. Every design program should be based in a conceptual framework in which there are mainly two multidisciplinary fields: design and education. This framework provides a structured and concrete way of improving learning activities in design. In this paper, we will focus on design education identifying, summarizing and comparing its pedagogical practices (PP’s) published in this matter. The first objective is accomplished with a survey of approaches, models and methods of teaching design (PW’s), made from 204 publications not only in product design but in architecture, arts and other disciplines. A comparative table shows the name of the PP’s, its conceptual foundations, the use of technology, role of the teacher and disciplinary origin. The second objective identified the elements in design education context to be able to describe relationships between them in the form of a pedagogical model to build in a future project.

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering, 2019

Technology plays a major role in the easement of teaching and learning in engineering education. Novel techniques adopted in the recent days, have resulted in a huge success on the part of educators. These techniques create a great difference in the instructional delivery, with real-time impact on the understanding and learning of students. In this context, Model Based Teaching and Learning (MBTL) is identified as one such resourceful method to teach certain educational concepts which require imagination. Use of models within the pedagogy of engineering education promotes meta cognitive thinking skills of students. The purpose of this research was to examine the advantages of adopting model-based teaching and learning for the course, Engineering Drawing for first year engineering students. A class of 120 Engineering students during the second semester participated in the research. The students were randomly grouped into two groups of each 60 in order to receive different treatments. The first group was identified as the Control group (CG) which was taught concepts of Engineering Drawing using traditional lecture method, while the second group, the Experimental Group (EG) was facilitated with models related to projection of lines and orthographic projections. The results revealed that using models had a significant impact on the academic achievement of the students. Based on their performance in the continuous assessment, it was concluded that models were very helpful in improving the marks, and also played an effective role in the comprehension of concepts.

2010 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2010

This paper presents results from the first phase of a longitudinal study of design cognition. The project examines how engineering students develop design competencies over time by applying a taskindependent approach to verbal protocol analysis based on the function-behavior-structure ontology. This analysis will be used to evaluate the effects of education on design cognition by following students in two curricula across three years (sophomore to senior). A large study pool from both programs completed spatial reasoning tests to determine overall population characteristics. A subset of this pool is now participating in verbal protocol studies in which students work in pairs to respond to a design scenario. This paper reports results of the spatial reasoning tests as well as preliminary results from the first set of protocol studies.

2009

This article argues for a future-oriented, inclusion of engineering modeling activities in introductory engineering courses at the university level. Engineering modeling activities provide a rich source of meaningful engineering problem situations that capitalise on and extend students' existing mathematics and engineering learning. We give consideration here to engineering modeling activities as a means for providing freshmen students with opportunities to work with authentic engineering problems even in introductory courses, to work in groups, to develop and revise powerful models and to document and present their solutions. We then report on a study in which a class of 29 first year civil engineering students developed several different models for solving the Bridge Design modeling activity. Results showed that students created models that adequately solved the engineering problem, although students did not seem fully aware of how their models should be revised in incorporating all provided data. Finally, recommendations for implementing engineering modeling activities and for further research are presented.

The increasing ease with which computer technology can be utilised nowadays results in students avoiding the use of physical models. Instead they tend to favour the development of three-dimensional computer models. Before-computer (BC) lecturers do not encourage this practice and believe that physical models still allow the best exploration within the design process. The pedagogical studio-teaching approach at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) is based on the facilitation of learning by emphasising the value of the design process, the value of an informed architectural idea and the value of active reflection on that process and idea.Within this approach a “container” that could act “as the central location for both recording and reflecting on” (Webster, 2001:9) was investigated. In undergraduate design projects, students were encouraged to actively build a series of working models. The building of the working models was the major part of the studio activity, but did not exclude sketching, drawing or computer modelling. Rather, a balance of media was used where the models played the major role in the development of projects. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the importance of the use of physical models. The process often started with a simple site model, from which a first architectural idea was developed. The models varied in scale and detail, but all contributed significantly to the development of an appropriate and integrated response to the design problem. They helped the students to recognise and develop their main architectural idea from concept to detail. They served as physical evidence of a student’s thought process and development. Unexpected and unintentional ideas often developed from these models. This paper documents the value observed in working models as a tool to help students in the design process with the development of, and active reflection on, an architectural idea. I.

International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2022

In this study, we aim to investigate activities using models in a design project in three technology classrooms. Activities that use models are important for students’ development of knowledge and skills connected to the design process. Nevertheless, few empirical studies have thus far examined how models and modelling are used in a classroom environment when students and teachers are involved in a design project. In order to meet our aim, we video-recorded eight lessons from three different technology classrooms (students aged 13–15), where the students were involved in different problem-solving activities using models and modelling. The three projects had different specifications, and the students’ degrees of freedom thereby varied. The video recordings were analysed using a qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in seven activities being identified where the teachers and students talked about models and modelling in order to solve the problem. The results also reveal...

2020

In this paper, we report on progress of a three-year longitudinal study on the impact of design education on students' design thinking and practice. Using innovations in cognitive science and new methods of protocol analysis, we are working with engineering students to characterize their design cognition as they progress through engineering curricula. To observe potential effects of design education, students from two curricula at a large research-intensive state university are being studied. The control group is a major focused on engineering mechanics, which has a theoretical orientation that focuses on mathematical modeling based on first principles and has little formal design education prior to the capstone experience. The experimental group is a mechanical engineering major that uses design as a context for its curriculum. In order to provide a uniform basis for comparing students across projects and years, the authors use a taskindependent protocol analysis method grounded in the Function-Behavior-Structure (FBS) design ontology. This paper presents results from the first-year of the study, which included students at the beginning and the end of their sophomore year. Students in the experimental group completed an introductory mechanical design course, while students in the control group had no formal design component in their curriculum. We analyze and compare the percent occurrences of design issues and syntactic design processes from the protocol analysis of both cohorts. These results provide an opportunity to investigate and understand how sophomore students' design ability is affected by a design course.

2009 39th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2009

To get at students' conceptual understandings of design and engineering activity, a group of graduate engineering students were asked to perform a series of drawing tasks. A group of first-year master's students in Mechanical Engineering enrolled in design project courses at Stanford University were asked to generate a concept map of their "typical design process" at the beginning and end of their course. Students were also asked to draw a designer at work and an engineer at work, along the lines of the Draw-a-Scientist Test. Initial findings from qualitative content analysis indicate that the concept maps of design process mature over time along a consistent learning trajectory. Students also have distinct but complimentary models of the roles of a designer and engineer along two emerging themes: idea generation vs. idea implementation and human-centered design vs. technology-centered. These intermediate results point to further study in this area.

2009 39th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, 2009

The Texas Tech University (Texas-Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) T-STEM Center develops and offers professional development workshops for K-12 teachers in the engineering design process. Although, for many years we have offered workshops in varied areas such as LEGO Robotics, rocketry, GLOBE, FOSS and PASCO, our aim is to provide teachers exciting and innovative ways to teach science, math and technology so teachers and students might see a direct correlation between the subject and engineering disciplines. By developing an engineering design model that is accessible to secondary teachers who have little or no background in engineering, teachers see how engineering crosses disciplines and can be addressed in any discipline. The Texas Tech Engineering Design Model uses project-based and problem-based learning as the underpinnings for introducing teachers to the design process in an approachable model that becomes more elegant in application as the model is used to solve problems.

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

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.

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.