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.

scholarly journals Design Integrated in the Mechanical Engineering Curriculum: Assessment of the Engineering Clinics

2007 ◽  
Vol 129 (7) ◽  
pp. 682-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Kadlowec ◽  
Krishnan Bhatia ◽  
Tirupathi R. Chandrupatla ◽  
John C. Chen ◽  
Eric Constans ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Integrated Design ◽  
Curriculum Assessment ◽  
Rowan University ◽  
Core Courses ◽  
Team Environment ◽  
Design Skills ◽  
The Impact

At Rowan University, design has been infused into the curriculum through an eight-semester course sequence called the Engineering Clinics. Through this experience, students learn the art and science of design in a multidisciplinary team environment and hone their design skills throughout their 4-year career. This paper describes the objectives of the clinics, types of projects, and how the clinics complement traditional core courses in the curriculum. Impacts and benefits of the clinics on students and faculty are discussed, including retention and graduate study rates comparing Rowan University mechanical engineering students to their peers nationally. An assessment of the clinics is presented based on survey data and accreditation objectives and outcomes. Survey data from students were assessed to determine levels of students’ satisfaction and confidence based on the clinics. Results of alumni and employer surveys also provide valuable feedback for assessing and improving the clinics as well as confirmation of the impact of clinics after graduation. Survey data are discussed along with challenges of the clinics at Rowan and adaptability of them at other institutions. Overall, the clinics are a positive and integrated design experience in the curriculum and assist students in achieving the program objectives.

Some Ontological Distinctions of Function Based on the Role Concept

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshinobu Kitamura ◽  
Riichiro Mizoguchi
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Product Life Cycle ◽  
Functional Modeling ◽  
Ontological Engineering ◽  
Product Life ◽  
Functional Models ◽  
Role Concept ◽  
Essential Function ◽  
The Relationship

Function is an important aspect of artifacts in engineering design. Although many definitions of function have been proposed in the extensive research mainly in engineering design and philosophy, the relationship among them remains unclear. Aiming at a contribution to this problem, this paper investigates some ontological issues based on the role concept in ontological engineering. We discuss some ontological distinctions of function such as essentiality and actuality and then propose some fundamental kinds of function such as essential function and capacity function. Based on them, we categorize some existing definitions in the literature and clarify the relationship among them. Then, a model of function in a product life-cycle is proposed. It represents the changes of existence of the individuals of each kind of function, which are caused by designing, manufacturing and use. That model enables us to give answers to some ontological questions such as when and where a function exists and what a function depends on. The consideration on these issues provides engineers with some differentiated viewpoints for capturing functions and thus contributes to consistent functional modeling from a specific viewpoint. The clarified relationships among the kinds of function including the existing definitions in the literature will contribute to interoperability among functional models based on the different kinds and/or definitions.

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.

An Investigation Into the Effectiveness of an Algorithmic Approach to Teaching Functional Modeling

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Nagel ◽  
Matt R. Bohm ◽  
Julie S. Linsey
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Functional Model ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Algorithmic Approach ◽  
Functional Models ◽  
Grammar Rules ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
Teaching Function

The consideration of function is prevalent across numerous domains as a technique allowing complex problems to be abstracted into a form more readily solvable. In engineering design, functional models tend to be of a more generalized nature describing what a system should do based on customer needs, target specifications, objectives, and constraints. While the value of function in engineering design seems to be generally recognized, it remains a difficult concept to teach to engineering design students. In this paper, a study on the effectiveness of an algorithmic approach for teaching function and functional model generation is presented. This paper is a follow-up on to the 2012 ASME IDETC paper, An Algorithmic Approach to Teaching Functionality. This algorithmic approach uses a series of grammar rules to assemble function chains which then can be aggregated into a complete functional model. In this paper, the results of a study using the algorithmic approach at Texas A&M in a graduate level design course are presented. The analysis of the results is discussed, and the preliminary evidence shows promise toward supporting our hypothesis that the algorithmic approach has a positive impact on student learning.

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 Human-Centric Functional Modeling of Biocomputers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy E Williams
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
General Problem ◽  
Functional Modeling ◽  
Biological Computing ◽  
Functional Models ◽  
Multiple Domains ◽  
The Impact

This paper explores how the technique of Human-Centric Functional Modeling might potentially be used to represent a broad subset of proposed implementations of biocomputing with anywhere from narrow to general problem-solving ability within a given domain, or across multiple domains, and how such functional models might be implemented by libraries of biological computing mechanisms. This paper also explores the insights to be gained from modeling biocomputers this way, and how Human-Centric Functional Modeling might significantly accelerate research and increase the impact of research in biocomputing through significantly increasing capacity for reuse of both biocomputing hardware and software.

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.

University Makerspaces: More Than Just Toys

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan C. Hilton ◽  
Shaunna F. Smith ◽  
Robert L. Nagel ◽  
Julie S. Linsey ◽  
Kimberly G. Talley
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
First Generation ◽  
First Generation College Students ◽  
Frequent User ◽  
First Generation College ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Design Skills ◽  
Hispanic Serving

University makerspaces are growing increasingly in vogue, especially in Colleges of Engineering, but there is little empirical evidence in the literature that these spaces impact the students. Speculations have been made about these spaces creating a community of practice, improving retention, improving design skills and self-efficacy, teaching manufacturing skills, improving creativity, and providing many other benefits, but this has not been empirically documented. This paper compares student engineering design self-efficacy (i.e., confidence, motivation, expectation of success, and anxiety toward conducting engineering design) to reported usage rates from a makerspace at a large Hispanic-serving university in the Southwestern United States. Not all users of these spaces were engineering students, and as such, responses were examined through the context of student major as well as differences in gender, race/ethnicity, or first-generation college student status. Design self-efficacy is critical because when individuals have high self-efficacy for particular skills they tend to seek more opportunities to apply those skills, and show more perseverance in the face of set-backs. Thus, self-efficacy is often a good predictor of achievement. The results from one year of data at the Hispanic-serving university indicate that female and first-generation college students have significantly lower engineering design self-efficacy scores. The data also shows that being a user of the makerspace correlates to a higher confidence, motivation, and expectation of success toward engineering design. Initial data from two additional schools are also consistent with these same results. These results indicate that, for all students, regardless of race/ethnicity and/or first generation status, being a frequent user of a university-serving makerspace likely positively impacts confidence, motivation, and expectation of success toward engineering design.

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