Rapidly Deployable Prototyping Activities to Teach Engineering Design

This paper describes kits that were deployed in a freshman engineering design course and used to enhance understanding of the engineering design process. In a first-year engineering design course student teams were given instructions and a kit of physical materials to work with. The instructions present a design challenge that can be solved through the creative assembly of the materials, as well as outline rules, timing and scoring of the challenge. Each activity can be completed in as little as one hour. Brevity of the assignment forces student teams to think quickly and rapidly functionalize ideas. Student teams use the time to complete the challenge and then compete against each other with their finished product. An example of one of these challenges is tasking the teams to develop a launcher capable of transporting a ping pong ball the furthest using a collection of low fidelity materials. Scoring is based on a strength to weight ratio. The activities are designed such that student teams are most successful when they allocate time in the challenge and methodically proceed through the design process. The steps that each of these kits focus on are planning, defining the design criteria or success criteria, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and iterating. Before and after the activity students take a survey that assesses their understanding of the engineering design process and queries how they would allocate time in a similar challenge based on the steps of the design process. We detail the student and faculty experiences and provide preliminary data from our pilot deployment of these kits. We will provide sample kits for other faculty to take home and solicit suggestions for adoption in other programs. Introduction Engineering design is a core component of any engineering education. Most students take some form of engineering design in their capstone experience, as is recommended by ABET [1]. Recently, however, more opportunities for this work have been created for underclassmen. Studies have shown that placing team-based engineering design earlier in an engineering curriculum can provide students with valuable teamwork skills and connections to real-world engineering work, as well as increase retention of material learned in class [2]. Teaching design freshman year increases retention of women and underrepresented minorities[3]. It also provides relevance and context to young engineers’ careers. While there is an increased interest in teaching engineering design, understanding how to teach it is still a challenge. Teaching engineering design requires instruction of process not content, something that is often foreign to students and instructors. When teaching engineering design in the classroom the format should focus more heavily on active learning than the traditional passive learning formats. Learning engineering design and practicing engineering design are two different things. The traditional engineering classroom typically includes greater fractions of passive learning than active participation. Concept understanding and knowledge retention have been shown to be higher with a variety of active learning types, such as problem based or active learning. [4]. In typical classes students are assessed based on performance on problem sets and tests that require knowledge gains from textbooks and lectures. Assessing engineering design is different, however, as it is based on evaluating students’ execution of processes explained in class, rather than quantifiable test outcomes with correct answers [5]. Repeatable methods to test processexecution are needed. The engineering design process is a decision-based process that can be used to break down and solve large and complex problems. Each university teaches a variation of the basic steps of the engineering design process: clarifying the problem, understanding the problem and context, defining design criteria, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and documentation. A central feature of the engineering design process is iteration. Iteration is used to cycle backwards to repeat steps when new information has come to light, when failure occurs, or when an alternate option needs to be explored. Success in the engineering design process requires a mindset that encourages iteration and revision as a once-only run through of the engineering design process is surely to yield mundane or already-attempted solutions. Teaching iteration in a lecture course is nearly impossible. The process of iteration includes making assumptions, creating artefacts based on those assumptions, testing those assumptions, synthesizing results and ultimately starting over with refined assumptions. Through these steps new information about a problem is generated, which influences the next steps [6]. Simply lecturing about these steps is insufficient to give students the experience necessary to effectively iterate in teams. Failure is one of the main reasons for iteration, but is difficult to teach about. The ability to identify and assess failures or other reasons for iteration can only be properly learned through hands-on experience. Previous studies have highlighted the ability to teach such concepts using hands-on activities such as model building and laboratory exercises. Lemons et al. showed that model building helped students generate ideas, make ties between concept and physical object, and finally make the students more away of their process-based strategies [6]. Mackenchnie and Buchanan have employed hands-on activities in a laboratory class using a building component [7]. The current work aims to teach crucial aspects of engineering design in short periods of time by providing students with simple building-based kits. Students use these kits in the classroom to solve challenges requiring steps from the engineering design process. The activities can be completed by most students as they require only practical ingenuity and creativity. Teams need to rapidly move through the steps of the engineering design process and iterate based on what they learn in order to be successful. These kits also provide instructors with an application of the design process to base student performance evaluations on, rather than typical question and answer. Kit Development The kits originally started as active learning challenges developed by faculty and staff at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen at Rice University. These kits were originally used for challenges offered at weekly lunch time events called INNOVATE Challenges [8]. These events were open to the public, students, and faculty. Attendees would draw a random number that would place them on a team with three other people. Participation was limited to 45 participants (15 teams), on a first come first serve basis. The challenge would be announced promptly at 12:05, begin immediately, and run for less than an hour. Prizes were awarded for the top teams. Challenges were adopted from a number of sources, including St. Louis University’s Weekly Innovation Challenges [9], Teampedia.net, a wiki-based website that lists team building exercises, and from brainstorming sessions with Rice instructors. Challenges were scoped to be completed in the one hour period including set up and breakdown. Before running a challenge during an INNOVATE event, the challenges were workshopped and played through numerous times by staff and professors to adjust to the right level of complexity based on time constraints and student experience. Complexity was added to each challenge by adding design specifications, or setting minimum criterion which were difficult to achieve. The goal was to set a difficulty level such that it was easy for teams to complete the process-based steps of the challenge, but alone would not guarantee success in meeting the design criterion. Instead, students or teams would have to make a leap, either creatively or intellectually, to innovate upon the challenge solution in order to meet the success criterion. The leap could only happen if students completed a build and test iteration cycle. Complexity of the challenges were adjusted to suggest iteration as a necessary step to meet the success criterion, rather than merely going through the steps of the design process. These challenges were later adapted and new ones developed to be deployed in a number of circumstances. The first ancillary product of these challenges was to teach workshop participants how to use low fidelity prototyping to communicate ideas and solve problems [10]. Low fidelity prototyping is a process that champions using readily available materials to build rapidly with low attention to aesthetic appeal and a strong focus on developing practical solutions. These workshops were taught with a kit of materials collected to run any of the challenges. Teams could then use the low fidelity materials and skills from these workshops for future projects. The second evolution of these challenges was to teach students the engineering design process, specifically the iterative aspects of building and testing. Success in the challenge is dependent upon how quickly teams can iterate, not quality of craftsmanship, aesthetics, or other surface level characteristics. One of the challenges was introduced at Michigan State University for EGR 100 Introduction to Engineering Design. This is a two-credit course taught in a lecture and laboratory format. Course learning objectives focus on engineering design and project management, technical communications, teamwork and engineering professionalism. Flipped classroom lectures are held once each week for 50 minutes throughout a 15-week semester. The laboratory sessions meet once per week for 110 minutes each. Lectures are held in a traditional auditorium, whereas the laboratory sessions are held in a computer lab facility with Windows ® based PCs. Lectures primarily deal with the various aspects of design, communication and the engineering profession