"Not All Those Who Wander are Lost": Route-Finding in First-Year Engineering Design

A geomatics-themed project was piloted in a cornerstone engineering design course with a total of 700 students. This paper reports on the structure and delivery of this project, which faced the challenges of limited student knowledge of engineering skills and analysis. However, the Geomatics project used common tools (GPS enabled smartphones and smartphone apps) which were easily understood by students and did not require any particular support from Geomatics faculty. The structure of the project involved student teams developing a set of waypoints and routes between the waypoints, on a university campus. A story or theme was required to be developed by the teams to select the waypoints and routes and which had two benefits; the first was that students explored their campus; and second was the students took ownership of the project and could better rationalize their design decisions. This paper will discuss project outcomes, illustrated by samples of student work and an increased recognition of a nontraditional engineering discipline. This paper will also discuss the lessons learned for future design projects as we discovered many aspects of the engineering design process that are normally not highlighted by standard product design projects.