Exploring the Impact of Virtual and Physical Dissection Activities on Students’ Understanding of Engineering Design Principles

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann F. McKenna ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Maximum Level ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Design Principles ◽  
Production Method ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Virtual Dissection ◽  
The Impact ◽  
And Storage

Product dissection has become a popular pedagogy for actively engaging engineering students in the classroom through practical hands-on experiences. Despite its numerous advantages, dissection of physical products has many drawbacks, including not only the costs required to start-up and maintain such activities but also the workspace and storage space needed for the products and tools used to dissect them. This paper presents results from on-going research that is investigating the extent to which dissection of virtual representations of products — what we refer to as virtual dissection — can be used in lieu of physical product dissection in the classroom. In particular, we found positive learning gains in students’ ability to identify and describe the function and production method of components contained in a hand-held power drill, for both physical and virtual dissection groups. However, the data also reveal differences in the overall maximum level attained as well as differences in the range and types of components identified between the groups. While we recognize that virtual dissection will never provide the same hands-on experiences as physical dissection, we contend that virtual dissection can be used effectively in the classroom to increase students’ understanding of engineering design principles. By substantiating this impact, we can help establish cost-effective sets of computer-based dissection activities that do not require extensive workspace and storage spaces and can be easily scaled to any size classroom.

i9MASKS Project

2022 ◽  
pp. 271-289
Author(s):  
Violeta Meneses Carvalho ◽  
Cristina S. Rodrigues ◽  
Rui A. Lima ◽  
Graça Minas ◽  
Senhorinha F. C. F. Teixeira
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Students ◽  
Educational Experiences ◽  
Learning By Doing ◽  
The Other ◽  
Teaching Staff ◽  
Summer Program ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Virus Spreading ◽  
The Impact

Engineering education is a challenging topic that has been deeply explored in order to provide better educational experiences to engineering students, and the learning by doing approach has been appraised. Amidst a global pandemic, an engineering summer program denominated i9Masks emerged and aimed to create transparent facial masks for preventing the virus spreading. This project had the participation of 21 students from different engineering areas, as well as professors and monitors whose guidance and commitment were of great importance for its success. Aiming to understand the importance of this engineering hands-on project for students' training, two inquiries were applied, being one for students and the other for professors and monitors/researchers. Students described this initiative as an amazing and innovative experience that they would like to repeat and considered useful for their careers. Regarding the impact perceived by the teaching staff, the results proved that they enjoyed participating in the i9MASKS project and sharing knowledge with students in a practical way.

The Assessment of Product Archaeology as a Platform for Contextualizing Engineering Design

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemper Lewis ◽  
Deborah Moore-Russo ◽  
Phil Cormier ◽  
Andrew Olewnik ◽  
Gül Kremer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
National Network ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
Novel Approaches ◽  
Knowledge And Practice ◽  
Pedagogical Innovations ◽  
Global World ◽  
The Impact

Many engineering departments struggle to meet “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” (Outcome h) that is required for ABET. As a result, engineering students receive meaningful contextual experiences in piecemeal fashion and graduate with a lack of concrete competencies that bridge knowledge and practice in the global world in which they will live and work. By considering products as designed artifacts with a history rooted in their development, our product archaeology framework combines concepts from archaeology with advances in cyber-enhanced product dissection to implement pedagogical innovations that address the significant educational gap. In this paper, we focus on assessing elements of a sustainable and scalable foundation that can support novel approaches aimed at educating engineering students to understand the global, economic, environmental, and societal context and impact of engineering solutions. This foundation is being developed across a network of partner institutions. We present recent results from freshman, sophomore, and senior courses at two of the partners in the national network of institutions.

Enhancing Engineering Learning Experience at UTB by Freshmen iHOP

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nazmul Islam
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Real World ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Project Based Learning ◽  
Senior Design ◽  
Team Selection ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Lower Division

Most of the engineering courses focus more on theory and very little on hands-on, project-based learning in the classroom. Integration of real-world engineering problems and applications in lower division engineering courses will produce engineering students, who will be technically sound and be able to execute and manage real-world projects, when they will do senior design projects in their final year of engineering study. To overcome the engineering design challenges we have developed iHOP (Ingenieŕia Hands on Project) and integrate it with our lower division engineering courses. iHOP has been developed to emphasis the design component at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) Engineering Physics curriculum and the project is now an integral part of Introduction to Engineering class. The iHOP project is one that is challenging, fun, requires teamwork, associated with the engineering material being studied, low cost, and doable in a limited amount of time. The experience from iHOP project motivates our freshman students to choose a better senior design project in senior year of their college career. The objectives of the iHOP projects are — to have students develop teamwork skills, and to teach students basic engineering design concepts in a complementary format to the traditional lecture. Various techniques related to team selection, encouraging teamwork, incorporation of engineering topics, keeping costs down, project results presentations, and gathering feedback from students will also be presented in this paper. Integrating iHOP Project with Introduction to Engineering class helped us to improve our retention effort in the engineering department.

Expanding the Solution Space in Engineering Design Education: A Simulation-Based Investigation of Product Dissection

2019 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Christopher McComb ◽  
Samuel T. Hunter ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Educational Level ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Solution Space ◽  
First Year ◽  
Creative Design ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Virtual Dissection ◽  
The Impact

Product dissection has been highlighted as an effective means of interacting with example products in order to produce creative outcomes. While product dissection is often conducted as a team in engineering design education, the research on the effectiveness of product dissection activities has been primarily limited to individuals. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the type(s) of product dissected in a team environment on encouraging creative design outcomes (variety, novelty, and quantity) and the underlying influence of educational level and dissection modality on these effects. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 14,000 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique using a design repository of 931 ideas generated by first-year and senior engineering students. The results of the study highlight the importance of educational level, dissection modality, and the number of products dissected on team design outcomes. Specifically, virtual dissection encouraged the exploration of more novel solutions across both educational levels. However, physical dissection encouraged the exploration of a larger variety and quantity of ideas for senior teams while virtual dissection encouraged the same in first-year teams. Finally, dissecting different types of products allowed teams to explore a larger solution space. The findings presented in this study can lead to a better understanding of how to deploy product dissection modules in engineering design education in order to drive creative design outcomes.

The Impact of Team-Based Product Dissection on Design Novelty

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Gül E. Okudan Kremer
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Current Design ◽  
The Impact

Although design novelty is a critical area of research in engineering design, most research in this space has focused on understanding and developing formal idea generation methods instead of focusing on the impact of current design practices. This is problematic because formal techniques are often not adopted in industry due to the burdensome steps often included in these methods, which limit the practicality and adoption of these methods. This study seeks to understand the impact of product dissection, a design method widely utilized in academia and industry, on design novelty in order to produce recommendations for the use or alterations of this method for supporting novelty in design. To investigate the impact of dissection, a study was conducted with 76 engineering students who completed a team-based dissection of an electric toothbrush and then individually generated ideas. The relationships between involvement in the dissection activity, the product dissected, the novelty and quantity of the ideas developed were investigated. The results reveal that team members who were more involved in the dissection activity generated concepts that were more novel than those who did not. In addition, the type of the dissected product also had an influence on design novelty. Finally, a positive correlation between the number of ideas generated and the novelty of the design concepts was identified. The results from this study are used to provide recommendations for leveraging product dissection for enhancing novelty in engineering design education and practice.

scholarly journals TEAM FORMATION IN ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSES

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Galaleldin ◽  
Justine Boudreau ◽  
Hanan Anis
Keyword(s):  
Student Satisfaction ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Project Based Learning ◽  
Team Composition ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Great Opportunity ◽  
Project Outcome ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact

Engineering design courses often include a team-based project. Project-based learning offers a great opportunity for engineering students to learn about teamwork and collaboration. It also gives students a chance to learn about themselves and improve their conflict management skills. Choosing the right team members for a specific project is not trivial, as the choice of the team often affects the project outcome and the students’ experience in the course. Moreover, there is a debate among engineering educators as to whether it is better to force team composition or not. In this paper, we investigate the impact of team composition and formation on project outcomes and student satisfaction in a second-year engineering design course at the University of Ottawa. The course is open to all engineering students and has an accessibility theme. Students work in teams with a client that has a specific accessibility need. Students meet the client three times during the semester and deliver a physical prototype by the end of the semester. For this study, students in the design course were divided into two groups. Students in the first group were allowed to pick their teams, while the instructor created the teams in the second group based on multidisciplinary composition and year of study. Both groups had the same instructor and the same course material, labs, project choices, etc. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a few teams in each group.

Can Design Teams Be Empathically Creative? A Simulation-Based Investigation on the Role of Team Empathy on Concept Generation and Selection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller ◽  
Jessica Menold ◽  
Jacquelyn Huff ◽  
Christopher McComb
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Computational Simulation ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
First Year ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Design Activities ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. However, research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance, particularly in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Specifically, it is unknown how the empathic composition of teams, average (elevation) and standard deviation (diversity) of team members’ empathy, would impact design outcomes in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to investigate the impact of team trait empathy on concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project. This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a design repository of 806 ideas generated by first-year engineering students. The main findings from the study indicate that the elevation in team empathy positively impacted simulated teams’ unique idea generation and selection while the diversity in team empathy positively impacted teams’ generation of useful ideas. The results from this study can be used to guide team formation in engineering design.

scholarly journals The Impact of Entrepreneurship on Engineering Education

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Majed Jarrar ◽  
Hanan Anis
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Education ◽  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Direct Observation ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Graduate Attributes ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

Engineering schools are integrating entrepreneurship within their curriculum in order to equip their students with the capacity to adapt quickly to technological innovation. The University of Ottawa has developed an entrepreneurship course that is open to all engineering students, and aims to provide them with a hands-on approach to starting and growing a technology start-up. This paper is centred on assessing the students who took this course. The results of the survey analyze the impact entrepreneurship has had on their engineering skillset. This skillset reflects the graduate attributes that the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) expects engineering students to develop. We will observe whether this impact has changed since the inception of this course in 2012 and throughout 5 course cycles. Using the survey results as well as the direct observation during those semesters, we present our analysis on how these outcomes can be replicated in other environments.

scholarly journals The Effects of Service-Based Learning on Metacognitive Strategies During an Engineering Design Task

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gay Lemons ◽  
Adam Carberry ◽  
Christopher Swan ◽  
Linda Jarvin
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Design Task ◽  
Service Activities ◽  
The Impact

Service-based learning has become an emerging pedagogical tool for engineering education. Although there is a large body of literature reporting the benefits of service activities, most studies have relied on self-report measures and generalized learning contributions. Our evaluation went beyond self-perceptions by investigating the impact that service-based learning programs had on specific cognitive elements of engineering design. The primary goal of this project was to investigate what effects, if any, service activities had on the engineering design process. Verbal protocols were collected from ten engineering students during an open-ended, model-building design task. The five service students and five non-service students also completed post-task interviews and reflection papers. The students in our sample who had participated in service-based learning activities voiced more metacognitive phrases, demonstrated more accurate task analysis and clearer strategic planning skills, were more skilled at discriminating useful from superfluous information, and had a better understanding of clients’ needs and constraints. From our sample, it appears that participation in service-based learning activities enhances the design process of engineering students.

Knowledge Retention and Scoring Metrics for Functional Modeling in an Engineering Design Context

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Riggs ◽  
Philip Mountain ◽  
Robert L. Nagel ◽  
Matt R. Bohm ◽  
Julie S. Linsey
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Knowledge Retention ◽  
Functional Modeling ◽  
Design Synthesis ◽  
Functional Models ◽  
Data Points ◽  
Design Skills ◽  
Teaching Function ◽  
The Impact

Functional modeling as a design methodology is often covered in engineering design texts as a tool for transforming “customer speak” into “engineering speak.” There is little to no empirical data, though, that clearly demonstrates that learning functional modeling actually improves students’ engineering design skills. The overall objective of this project is to determine the impact of teaching function on engineering students’ design synthesis abilities. This paper focuses on preliminary data collected as a part of the longitudinal study. Students were asked to generate functional models of functionally similar systems at two points during an engineering design course: (1) once as a homework assignment immediately following the introduction of the topic and (2) again as a low stakes in-class activity seven weeks later. This paper will present the comparison of models created at both data points. Student models at each time point are analyzed using a validated 18-question rubric. The results provide promise that, in general, students retain their modeling ability, but there are noted characteristic differences between homework-generated functional models and those generated later in the semester during an in-class activity. These characteristics will be discussed as will potential improvements to the scoring rubric.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document