The Design of Projects and Contests - the Rules of the Game

This paper describes some of the ideas and guidelines the authors have developed for designing student projects in engineering design courses. In our teaching we use projects extensively, and have taught project-based courses at all levels. We find that in most courses we face the same basic issues on how to design and use projects to achieve our educational goals. This paper briefly outlines our philosophy and touches on the following basic topics: what is a project and why do we use them, how does one design a design project, what is the philosophy behind a project, issues in the use of design teams and deciding on project rules. In addition we briefly critique the concept of head-to-head contests.