Preliminary Findings From Coding Student Design Journals

Since Fall 2000, mechanical engineering students at Montana State University have been required to keep design journals of their senior design projects. We have now accumulated over 70 journals on 21 design projects. We developed a coding scheme to code the journal data by design activity (problem definition, idea generation, engineering analysis, and design refinement), design level (concept, system, detail), planning, and formal reporting. The scheme was then used to code approximately one-third of the journal data collected to date. This paper will first describe the coding scheme and its development. It will then report some preliminary findings from the journal coding. Specifically, we will show that journal data can be used to produce time profiles of design activity over the course of the projects, estimates of the proportion of time spent in activity associated with the different codes, and comparisons of student processes to “good” design processes as documented in the literature. These findings should be of interest to design educators interested in assessing design processes. Finally, the paper will posit a number of hypotheses that arise from the data, for future consideration.