Improving Engineering Design Education: From Skills to Educational Objectives

The objective of this paper is to propose an engineering design educational pedagogy on how to improve the engineering design skills. The design engineering activity is a complex mix of skills and knowledge that has been taught over decades by directly delivering to the students the design methodologies developed by design researchers and by exposing the students to open ended projects that can develop their design skills. From this we can conclude that the three main pedagogical components of a successful educational design experience are: the design skills, the design methods and the design projects. However the individual design skills must be properly developed in the student prior to the project experience and since this is generally not the case, makes it an overwhelming challenge for the student. We present an approach to design engineering teaching through four main steps: First, define the desired knowledge and skills to be acquired by the student during the learning process. Second, organize the skills to be acquired in complexity levels. Third, generate educational objectives for each of the skills. Although the scope of this paper stops here, the educational objectives can be transformed in educational tasks (i.e. lectures, problems, exams, etc.) by using educational theories (teaching styles, learning styles, etc.) in such a way that the student will be able to develop those skills. This model could serve initially as a diagnostic tool to characterize the current set of skills of a given design course or program. The model can also be used to implement educational tasks into the classroom and labs depending on the desired student profile.