A Team Based Design Competition For Freshman Engineering Students That Emphasizes Sustainable Design

This paper discusses a design competition for freshman students in the School of Engineering at James Madison University. Our engineering program has a sustainability focus that is specifically related to sustainable design and sustainable systems analysis. Our philosophy of sustainable design incorporates technical, economic, environmental, and societal criteria. Our program includes a ten credit design course sequence in which development of tangible prototypes and models will be emphasized. The purpose of the freshman design competition is to introduce our freshmen to our philosophy of sustainable design, introduce our students to some of the tools available to them in our Engineering Design Studio, and to develop a sense of community in our freshmen. Participants in the design competition are introduced to our philosophy of sustainable design via the competition rules and scoring formulas. Students in the competition are required to attend a training session in our Engineering Design Studio where they are introduced to basic construction tools, tool usage techniques, and layout techniques. The Engineering Design Studio also serves as the facility that students use to build their design competition entries. Students sign up for the competition in groups of three or four during the first two weeks of fall semester classes. Our program does not have a required engineering course until the spring semester of the freshman year so this is the first opportunity for our students to work together on an engineering activity. This paper addresses the competition rules and scoring formula along with our rationale for each to facilitate transferability to others that are planning design competitions. We developed a formula to rate the student designs that incorporates scores from each of the four elements of our sustainable design philosophy. This formula and the underlying rationale are included in order to assist others who wish to assess student work using sustainable design criteria. We also present the competition results in order to share which aspects of the competition the students chose to prioritize. Post-competition feedback obtained from anonymous surveys of participants, faculty, and the external judges from local industries is given and discussed in order to show the aspects of the competition process that worked well, and those that may be modified. Introduction James Madison University (JMU), traditionally known as a liberal arts school, has recently created a School of Engineering which offers a single engineering degree: Bachelor of Science in Engineering. Our inaugural class of 120 students started as freshmen in the fall of 2008. The engineering program is designed to meet ABET accreditation criteria and to prepare our students to take the FE exam. The program has a sustainability focus, with particular attention paid to sustainable design and systems analysis. Our philosophy of sustainable design incorporates technical, financial, environmental, and societal criteria. The backbone of our curriculum consists of a 10 credit sequence of design courses that extend through the entire sophomore, junior, and senior years. These courses are laboratory courses and contain significant project P ge 14130.2 work as well as design instruction. Our approach to teaching design includes instruction in critical thinking practices such as the development of “intentional and directed intellectual processes and habits that foster effective thinking”. This approach is complemented by projects that require students to physically construct their designs as part of the design iteration process. Our assertion is that critical thinking in combination with hands-on project experience inspires better design. Although our students are required to take specific courses in their first semester to begin satisfying degree requirements, the introductory engineering course is not taught until the spring semester. We speculated that many of our students would be interested in participating voluntarily in an engineering school activity if given the opportunity. We decided to provide an extracurricular competition for our freshmen students as an innovative way to introduce the sustainability design content they will experience throughout the program and to develop a sense of community within the School of Engineering. The competition itself requires students to work in teams to design and build a device to launch a small projectile at a target. Teams are judged on demonstrated accuracy, cost, weight of materials and disposal plan, and level of collaboration. In this way the competition incorporates the technical, economic, environmental, and societal criteria of our sustainable design philosophy. Motivation for Competition Numerous design competitions exist for engineering students or prospective engineering students. Design competitions are often considered a means to generate a level of enthusiasm for academic material not typically observed in the classroom and can serve as an object lesson of the need for teamwork and communication . Many of the most popular competitions are sponsored by national or international engineering societies and attract competitors from institutions around the globe. Other competitions may exist only at a single school, or even within a single course. All engineering competitions typically share the broad objective of promoting engineering academic objectives. Other specific objectives are reflected in the competition rules which sometimes reflect a desire to influence social behavior. For instance, in a situation where the retention of under-represented groups is an objective, competition rules require inclusion of a member of an under-represented group on each team. In another case in which a regional high school competition was modeled after a national competition, additional requirements were added at the regional level in order to fulfill the local objective of promoting interdisciplinary work between technology education students and college prep students. Although the primary thrust of the national competition required welding and construction skills that are within the purview of the technology education students, the regional competition required teams to respond to questions of a scientific nature. It was noted that since the technology education students and college prep students rarely interacted academically, the additional requirements were one way to get the groups to communicate with each other. Academic and social objectives both serve as motives for our design competition. Our academic objectives are to introduce freshman students to our philosophy of sustainable design and give them the opportunity to have a design/build experience. Sustainable design is the focus of our program, sustainability issues are often complex and as such may not be accessible to freshmen; we intend the design competition to introduce sustainability concepts at a basic level. Our P ge 14130.3 programs’ approach to design includes a significant hands-on component; we intend that the competition familiarize some of our students with our construction facilities and give them construction experience. From a social perspective we want to give our freshman students an opportunity to interact with each other and with the faculty and staff of the school of engineering in order to develop a sense of community. Our curriculum does not include an engineering course in the first semester; the competition is a way to allow students to identify each other and to begin the formation of social networks. Since the freshmen that took part in the first annual competition were also in our inaugural class, we wanted them to interact with the faculty and staff to develop their attachment to the program. We view the competition as an opportunity to influence our programs identity; a demonstration that we value collaborative work and extracurricular learning activities.