DEFINING THE APPROPRIATE COURSE PROJECT FOR FOSTERING THE EXPECTED COGNITIVE COMPETENCIES: EBD APPROACH TO AN ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE

Abstract

Project-based learning is an inevitable part of current course curriculums, especially in engineering design courses. Incorporating course projects in curriculums is done for overcoming the lack of students’ familiarity with real-world challenges. Students either acquire or further develop those specific competencies upon successful completion of the course project. Thus, defining an appropriate course project becomes essential. The competencies that are fostered may depend either on the design problem or the project contexts. In this study, we employ an EBD approach to developing a framework for evaluating a course project regarding its fitness to course learning objectives. This framework makes it possible to elicit required competencies for accomplishing a course project and comparing it with the set of competencies in the course learning objectives. A case study of a flying house design project is presented to demonstrate the framework application. The discussion of the proposed framework and future directions to our research are presented at the end.