Abstract— The College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University requires its students to take a semester long engineering profession and project-based design course as first-year students and a capstone project-based design course over the span of two semesters as seniors. There is a desire to ascertain the actual and normalized time, process progression, and traffic patterns of engineering student design project teams navigating a design process and gauge these metrics across engineering majors and against faculty impressions and expectations, with an eventual goal of gauging against professional practice as well. Once student design activity application is analyzed with respect to faculty and professional expectations, pedagogical and curricular content adjustments can be made as necessary to align these project-based, experiential learning activities with perceived practice. The analysis of student progress compared to faculty and professional perspectives will provide an opportunity to dissect and reinforce the foundation of engineering design education at the University.
I. INTRODUCTION Properly designed cornerstone design projects can
potentially address most, possibly all, of the ABET 2000 Criteria to varying extents throughout the project. Cornerstone design coursework supports constructionist pedagogical theory and incorporates instructional strategies that are student-centered and promote active learning while addressing a variety of learning styles [1]. When compared to the traditional lecture environment, the enhanced environmental similarity of cornerstone (and capstone) experiences to the engineering workplace fosters more transferability and provides the student with importance and reason for that which they are learning through simultaneously applying content in the instructor-provided context as they learn it, as shown by several studies reviewed by Prince and Felder [2]. The importance of design in engineering education curricula is emphasized by Dym [3].
Freshman and senior level student application of and transitions within the design process are studied using short design scenarios [4, 5] where it is shown through verbal
protocol analysis that senior level students showed greater numbers of transitions throughout information processing phases, possibly correlating to greater process efficiency, and a higher quality paper design. These studies of freshman versus senior engineering student applications of the design process through short, open-ended scenarios are somewhat analogous at the micro level to the ongoing study discussed here of engineering student applications of the design process through existing term-length and mini design project-based learning curriculae at the macro level in a full-term project experience.
Teaching in a student-centered manner allows students to incur educational experiences that straddle many learning styles to satisfy the needs of the heterogeneous student body. Project-based learning by its nature incorporates much of the spectrum of learning styles. Project-based learning also invokes many pedagogical approaches and theories throughout its application. This work in progress presents preliminary results from an ongoing study [6-7] on engineering student design activity with the eventual goal of comparing student activities against the practices and prescriptions of design experts in academia and industry.
II. PURPOSE This study investigates student application of design
process scaffolding provided to students in first-year and senior year engineering design project experiences by measuring student activities as students navigate various phases of the design process and manage their projects.
Questions considered in this ongoing study include: • Is the design process and project management
scaffolding provided to first-year engineering students in cornerstone experiences appropriate?
o How much time do students spend on each phase of the design process and project management phases of the cornerstone design project?
o What is the frequency of and what design activities comprise iterations in the phases of the design process and project management?
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University 2012-13 Faculty Internal Research Grant #13294.
o How do student weekly activities compare to desired (expert) practices?
o How do these metrics vary, if at all, across different design projects?
III. METHODS / PROCEDURE In current efforts to address research questions, students’
application of the engineering design process is monitored via biweekly surveys throughout their design project experiences. The student team data collection is currently ongoing and uses the information provided by the senior design courses of the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Freshman Engineering Department’s EGR 101: Introduction to Engineering project data. The data is collected through an anonymous survey instrument that has a list of potential activities visited during a design effort. The current version of the survey was informed by a pilot study, a literature review, and faculty survey. In this latest version of the survey, students provide section and team identifiers, the time spent on each design activity, the number of group members who participated in each activity, the number of visits to each activity, the two-week time period during which the activities occurred, and the design activity visited prior to each activity being addressed. The Design Process Weekly Survey is shown in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Design Process Weekly Survey.
This survey was changed from the pilot version from the previous academic year after querying for the students’ opinions on ease of survey comprehension and the procedure for populating it. The most significant difference between survey versions is previously each activity was called a step and each step featured only one definition. The current survey has multiple definitions of each activity to better accommodate each professor’s choice of terminology and explanation of the design process. Another difference is that the previous survey did not query the students on the originating activity that immediately preceded the current activity for which students are providing visit time and instance quantity data.
A. Data Collection The surveys were given to observe how student teams work
through a design cycle during a project. The design survey was given to two specific groups, the Mechanical Engineering (ME) senior design students and the freshman EGR 101 students. EGR 101 is Embry-Riddle’s introductory engineering course. This class takes up 2.5 to 3 hours a week and the projects are mostly done outside of the classroom with a few
classes working in a lab. Senior design students work on one project over two semesters and have class for 3 hours per week, but most students work many hours outside of class as well. The students were asked to separate into their project teams to complete the survey. Also, a majority of first-year students complete several mini projects throughout the semester rather than one large project for the entire semester. The EGR 101 surveys collected for this study addressed one mini-project.
B. Frequency and Schedule The design surveys were given out biweekly throughout
two semesters for the senior design students and two to three times in one semester for the first year students. The first year students were given the surveys once after the first week that the project was assigned, one to two times during the middle of the project and once again at the end of the project. The senior design students had a graduate student familiar with the design survey proctor each biweekly meeting. Due to the great number of sections, the first year students were proctored by their professors who received a briefing on the design survey.
C. Faculty Surveys Engineering design faculty were also surveyed. Faculty
were asked to indicate design process scaffolding provided to their students, how students are expected to apply the design process, student levels of preparedness and relative weaknesses before, during, and after project experiences, and how student design application related to their own professional experiences.
IV. RESULTS The seniors had a classroom size of 8 to 14 students
whereas the first year students had a classroom size ranging 28 to 32 students. The largest senior design subgroups consisted of 3-4 students while the largest first year teams consisted of 6-7 students. In the 2012-13 academic year, 47 first-year student teams have provided 1762 design process activity data records and 17 senior design teams have provided 2284 process activity data records. The results of the student team surveys are compared to the faculty survey feedback. Normalized, aggregated student time spent on design activities is graphically displayed and can be seen on Fig. 2 and 3. Design process raw (non-normalized) traffic patterns are also graphically displayed and are shown in Fig. 4 and 5. Table 1 is lists the data from which those figures were derived.
Fig. 2. Aggregate of First-Year Student Fig. 3. Aggregate of ME Senior Survey of the Fall 2012 Semester. Design Survey 2012-13.
NUMBER ACTIVITY TIME PARTICIPANTS VISITS VISITED FROM
ORDER NOT IMPORTANT; JUST A LABEL
WITH EXAMPLES / DESCRIPTION
TOTAL HRS:MIN SPENT HERE SINCE LAST
SURVEY
NUMBER OF PEOPLE
WORKING ON THIS
TOTAL NUMBER OF VISITS SINCE
LAST SURVEY
LIST PRECEDING STEP NUMBER PRIOR TO EACH
VISIT HERE
Project Management and TeamworkTime and Resource Management and Task Scheduling, Team
Aggregate of ME Senior DesignFall 2012 - Spring 2013
Fig. 4. First-year engineering EGR 101 design process traffic.
Fig. 5. Mechanical Engineering senior design process traffic.
TABLE I. DESIGN ACTIVITY TRAFFIC COUNTS
V. DISCUSSION It is noteworthy that the senior design students generally
completed the survey more correctly than the first-year students. It was common to see that the first-year students did not properly indicate which activity was last visited before moving on. The senior design students completed the surveys more willingly and carefully with an instructor present. In some cases, the instructions were given several times and confusion in survey response was resolved through conversation with the students. Survey completion was requested as a team effort, but sometimes only one team member would complete a survey for an entire team.
The pie charts depict a proportion of time student teams spent on the various design activities. As seen from the data in Table 1 and Fig. 4 and 5, the first-year students spent much of their visits in the first third of the design process and visits generally involved less skipping of neighboring steps. The ME
senior design students spent more of their normalized time working on Brainstorming / Design Concepts (step 3), Detailed Design / Communication (7), and Production (8), but relatively less time on Research / Testing / Analysis (4), Modeling / Prototyping (5), and Model / Protype Evaluation (6).
Differences in freshman versus senior application of the design process are likely the result of differences in project scope and student experience and advancement.
VI. FUTURE WORK AND CONCLUSION Aerospace and Civil engineering senior capstone design
data collection is planned during the 2013-14 academic year, as is a faculty Delphi study derived from existing faculty survey data to further refine faculty input. The Delphi study will address faculty impressions of student design activities and faculty expertise regarding the most important areas of student focus within the design process and the key process iteration loops to emphasize. This information will be gauged against actual student design activity. Although the survey was changed once and the input and opinions of the students are different every semester, it is important that the survey be adopted on a semester-to-semester basis to better suit varying groups of students. The data collected support programmatic monitoring, improvement, and comparisons across engineering departments of experiential learning via application of the design process by engineering students. The findings were also included in relevant ABET accreditation materials.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the faculty of the
Mechanical and Freshman Engineering Departments and faculty teaching the first-year design topics in EGR 101 for continuing to allow the authors to use their classrooms, survey their students, and survey the faculty themselves as well.
REFERENCES [1] Felder, R.M. and L.K. Silverman. 1988. “Learning and Teaching Styles
in Engineering Education.” Engineering Education. Vol. 78(7), pp. 674-681.
[2] Prince, M.J. and R. M. Felder. April 2006. “Inductive Teaching and Learning Methods: Definitions, Comparisons, and Research Bases.” Journal of Engineering Education. Vol. 95(2), pp. 123-138.
[3] Dym, C.L. 1999. “Learning Engineering: Design, Languages, and Experiences.” Journal of Engineering Education. Vol. 88(2), pp. 145-148.
[4] Adams, R., & C. J. Atman (2000). Characterizing engineering student design processes: An illustration of iteration. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education, St. Louis, Session 2330.
[5] Atman, C. J., Cardella, M. E., & Turns, J. (2005). Comparing freshman and senior engineering design processes: an in-depth follow-up study. Design Studies, 26(4), 325-57.
[6] Allam Y., C. Whitfield, and J.N. Phanthanousy. “Scaffolding Provided to Engineering Students in Cornerstone Design Project Scenarios Related to Practices of Expert Designers.” 9-13 June 2012. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference. San Antonio, Texas.
[7] Whitfield, C. A., R. J. Freuler, Y. Allam, and E.A. Riter. “An Overview of Highly Successful First-Year Engineering Cornerstone Design Projects.” 21-26 August 2011. International Conference on Engineering Education, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
