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2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Redesign of the Introduction to Engineering Course and its Impact on Students’ Knowledge and Application of the Engineering Design Process

Presented at First-Year Programs Division Technical Session 6: Design and Design Chanllenges

Redesign of the Introduction to Engineering Course and its Impact on Students’ Knowledge and Application of the Engineering Design Process

This evidence-based practice paper will discuss the new structure of the 2-credit introduction to engineering course at [institution] and its impact on students' knowledge and application of the Engineering Design Process. This course was previously structured to have two relatively independent parts. It began by introducing the engineering design process as well as basic engineering skills, tools, and software for the first 6-7 weeks, and ended with a 7-8 week multidisciplinary hands-on team design project. Students learned the concepts needed for the project during the first half of the semester, but they did not have to connect concepts from one unit to the next until the final design project in the second half of the semester. Of specific concern was that students were taught the engineering design process during the second week of the class, but this was not applied to a complete design project until the second half of the class. This course has recently been restructured to teach the design and project concepts in the context of a semester-long project. All details and techniques of the engineering design process, as well as other basic engineering skills and tools, are introduced throughout the entire semester as they become useful in the design project. With the new structure, more just-in-time learning would occur and students are able to apply what they learn immediately in the context of the project.

The new course structure was implemented during the 2015 fall semester in 6 sections of the course, with approximately 40 students each, taught by the authors. Its impact on students’ knowledge and application of the engineering design process will be assessed using a pre- and post-test developed by Saterbak, et al.[1]. Each time, students will be asked to critique a Gantt chart that describes a 14-week schedule of a design project that has many flaws. More specifically, they will be instructed to elaborate on the steps of the design process, discuss strategies appropriate to accomplish each step, and identify strengths and weaknesses of the proposed design process. A class taught using the old structure during the Spring 2015 semester by one of the authors will serve as a control group for the study. The same test was given to the control group during spring 2015 as a take home exam. All responses will be evaluated using the rubrics created by Saterbak, et al. at 8 levels: needs assessment/establishing design criteria; design context review; idea generation; analysis and decision-making; building and testing; overall layout of a design process and iteration; time allotments; and documentation[1]. The results will be compared and discussed.

References
[1] Saterbak, A., Volz, T., “Assessing Knowledge and Application of the Design Process in a First-Year Engineering Design Course”, in American Society for Engineering Education Conference, Proceedings of, Indianapolis, IN, 2014.

Authors
  1. Dr. Haolin Zhu Arizona State University [biography]

    Dr. Haolin Zhu earned her BEng in Engineering Mechanics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and her Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University, with a focus on computational solid mechanics. Dr. Zhu is an Associate Teaching Professor of the freshman engineering education team in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU). In this role, she focuses on designing the curriculum and teaching in the freshman engineering program and the mechanical engineering program. She is also the Co-Director of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP) at ASU. In this role, she focuses on student support and tracking, curriculum, program requirements, as well as programming for current students in GCSP. Dr. Zhu was also involved in the ASU ProMod project, the Engineering Projects in Community Service program, the Engineering Futures program, the Global Freshman Academy/Earned Admission/Universal Learner Courses Program, and the ASU Kern Project. She was a part of the team that designed a largely team and activity based online Introduction to Engineering course. She has also co-developed two unique MOOCs, Introduction to Engineering and Perspectives on Grand Challenges for Engineering for the Global Freshman Academy/ASU Earned Admission/Universal Learner Courses Program. Her Ph.D. research focuses on multi-scale multiphase modeling and numerical analysis of coupled large viscoelastic deformation and fluid transport in swelling porous materials, but she is currently interested in various topics in the field of engineering education, such as innovative teaching pedagogies for increased retention and student motivation; innovations in non-traditional delivery methods, incorporation of the Entrepreneurial Mindset in the engineering curriculum and its impact. She has published over 30 papers and presented at various conferences about her work. She is recognized as an Engineering Unleashed Fellow and won the Fulton Outstanding Lecturer Award for her contributions in Engineering Education.

  2. Dr. Benjamin Emery Mertz Arizona State University [biography]

    Dr. Benjamin Mertz received his Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2005. He spent 7 years as a part of a lecturer team at Arizona State

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