Immersive Experience Impact on Students' Understanding of Design

To promote undergraduate students’ understanding of a human-centered design process, we conducted an engineering design course over a three we k summer session which included an immersive experience at an outdoor center that host s camps for children with disabilities. There were 13 participants in the course. We measured th participants’ understanding of design by categorizing their responses to a soapbox derby car design task at the beginning and end of the course. We determined that the participants genera lly m de progress toward empathic design, where both their understanding of the design proces s and their understanding of the stakeholders improved simultaneously. We recommend the inclusio n of short course immersive experiences such as this for teaching human-centered design.