Techniques For Advising Undergraduate Students On Senior Engineering Design Projects

With the recommendation from ABET, each engineering student should go through a major engineering design experience and understand how to go from design specifications to a final artifact. The Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS) started automotive design projects including competition vehicles and proof of concept vehicles for its undergraduate students many years ago. These projects aim to provide practical engineering education to the students through vehicle design and fabrication with hands-on experience. The project lifecycle usually does not last longer than one year as it is governed by the competition and the academic cycle. With many years of experience supervising students, the best practice of guiding students learning through this engineering design project within one academic year is developed. Before each project, students will first go through training and apprenticeship. Such project usually starts with problem formulation that studies the requirements of vehicle for the competition and the resources available. The team of students will go from design specifications to a final vehicle prototype with generating alternatives, synthesizing, analyzing, fabrication, testing and evaluating. This method allows sustainability in vehicle design projects. NUS Eco-car project is used as a case study to illustrate the best practice. Our past experience showed that students trained in this project have strong practical and analytical skills and are able to manage and communicate in a team well.

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Steps Towards Geographically Dispersed Collaborative Student Design Projects

Volume 3a: 8th Design for Manufacturing Conference ◽

10.1115/detc2003/dtm-48680 ◽

2003 ◽

Author(s):

Shayne Gooch ◽

Tony Medland

Keyword(s):

New Zealand ◽

Engineering Design ◽

Undergraduate Students ◽

Collaborative Design ◽

Web Pages ◽

Education Programs ◽

Geographically Dispersed ◽

Time Zones ◽

Collaborative Working ◽

Design Projects

A need exists to teach undergraduate students the skills required for collaborative working in geographically dispersed teams. A program for running collaborative student engineering design projects between the Universities of Bath (United Kingdom) and Canterbury (New Zealand) was implemented in January 2002. This paper presents the approach to collaborative working on this first project. The paper shows that whilst the Universities run on different education programs, and are in different time zones, a path is found for the integration of a collaborative design project within the curriculum of both design courses. The primary forms of communication were email, project web pages and videoconferences. The results of the study provide a basis for further collaborative exchanges between the Universities.

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Evaluating the Effectiveness of Problem Formulation and Ideation Skills Learned Throughout an Engineering Design Course

Volume 3: 17th International Conference on Advanced Vehicle Technologies; 12th International Conference on Design Education; 8th Frontiers in Biomedical Devices ◽

10.1115/detc2015-46542 ◽

2015 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mahmoud Dinar ◽

Yong-Seok Park ◽

Jami J. Shah

Keyword(s):

Engineering Design ◽

Objective Assessment ◽

Problem Formulation ◽

Engineering Product ◽

Design Problems ◽

Web Based ◽

Final Project ◽

Design Projects ◽

Design Skills ◽

Long Course

Conventional syllabi of engineering design courses either do not pay enough attention to conceptual design skills, or they lack an objective assessment of those skills to show students’ progress. During a semester-long course of advanced engineering product design, we assigned three major design projects to twenty five students. For each project we asked them to formulate the problems in the Problem Formulator web-based testbed. In addition, we collected sketches for all three design problems, feasibility analyses for the last two, and a working prototype for the final project. We report the students’ problem formulation and ideation in terms of a set of nine problem formulation characteristics and ASU’s ideation effectiveness metrics respectively. We discuss the limitations that the choice of the design problems caused, and how the progress of a class of students during a semester-long design course resulted in a convergence in sets of metrics that we have defined to characterize problem formulation and ideation. We also review the results of students of a similar course which we reported last year in order to find common trends.

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