Evaluating the Impact of Teaching Function in an Engineering Design Curriculum

Functional modeling is often covered as a critical element of the engineering design process in engineering design texts, but little empirical data clearly demonstrates that functional modeling improves engineering designs or that teaching functional modeling makes students better designers. The overall objective of this project is to determine the impact of teaching function on engineering students’ design synthesis abilities. Two studies are being performed as a part of this project: (1) a longitudinal study following students through their sophomore, junior, and senior year following some being taught functional modeling, while others not, and (2) a yearly study looking at capstone project quality of students from cohorts either taught or not taught functional modeling. This paper focuses on preliminary data collected as a part of the longitudinal study using a functional modeling skills quiz to assess students’ ability to understand and represent a system. In particular, a functional modeling skill assessment quiz is being investigated for its ability to discern the extent of a student’s function knowledge. Two student groups are studied, one taught functional modeling along with function enumeration, and a second taught only function enumeration. The results provide promise that the skills quiz is working as desired; however, work is yet needed to develop an adequate scoring technique.