Evaluation and Analysis of Freshman Design Courses in Engineering

Design is a crucial component to engineering. Therefore, it is important for engineering students to learn and practice design skills early in their education. At the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, two implementations of design education were explored; a two-semester design experience with a focus on learning-by-doing, and a single semester experience with a focus on balancing the theoretical foundations of design, communications, and project management, with practical lab workshops. The focus of this paper is the development and evaluation of criteria used to compare these two approaches to a freshman design experience. Using the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) Graduate Attributes criteria and drawing from the Conceive-Design-ImplementOperate (CDIO) Initiative as the basis for evaluation, a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the two design courses in terms of learning outcomes is explored.