First-year Engineering Design Course Research Articles

Embracing Co-Design: A Case Study Examining How Community Partners Became Co-Creators

Co-design increases the number of voices in a design project, which enhances the experience for all co-creators and produces a better product. A case study is presented of a ten-month co-design project-based learning experience between two engineering design students and two community partners during a first-year engineering design course, which resulted in the implementation of the device across campus. This paper evaluates the elements of co-design in the design process that was employed, documents the design product that was produced, and examines the experience of the community partners through a qualitative study. Through a retrospective examination of artifacts and files, the design process demonstrated an increase in the amount of collaboration between co-creators as the project progressed and identified 15 iterations of the design. Comparing the experience of community partners throughout the design process, five themes emerged from the semi-structured interviews: (1) emotional effects, (2) physical and mental effects, (3) productivity, (4) safety, and (5) job satisfaction. Documenting the experience of community partners throughout the design project can encourage educators to adopt co-design practices in project-based learning.

Participation in a team-based, first-year engineering design course associated with improved teaming skills during senior capstone engineering design

Participation in a team-based, first-year engineering design course associated with improved teaming skills during senior capstone engineering design

Living-Learning Communities in the First-year Engineering Experience

This exploratory study investigates the design and impacts of a curated Living-Learning Community (LLC) piloted at a large student residence for a large (1000+ student) first-year engineering design course. Alongside the live-in Faculty-in-Residence (FiR), the research includes surveying first-year engineering students participating in this program and understanding the impacts on the lived student experience, and student motivation. The first-year engineering design, teamwork, and communication course is central to engineering education at this large institution. The course offers opportunities for students to work in multidisciplinary teams, applying term knowledge to authentic engineering applications, in a problem-based learning environment. The goal of the LLC is to create opportunities for interaction and scaffolded connection between like-minded students taking similar courses and inspire learning within the students living environment; an entire floor of the Residence is assigned to be an LLC for the 2022 academic year, with support from the Don, ResLife Office, and the Faculty-in-Residence (an engineering faculty member). The purpose of this study is to observe and report on the student experience throughout the duration of the course. We aim to learn how participating in the Living-Learning community can affect the perception of confidence in students’ learning of course concepts, and inter-team relations. In order to do so, students will be surveyed at multiple check points throughout the semester. Furthermore, additional relevant information will be gathered from the Living-Learning Community Don, teaching assistants, and the course instructors. The outcome of this analysis has the potential to educate us on the positive and negative connotations that come along with close-quarters learning. The applications of the results found with this study can be vast, from influencing future residence programs and the first-year engineering education experience. This study focuses on the student’s perception of their experience. Understanding how the perception of manageability of workload [1] can affect student mental health leads the curiosity of how close-quarters learning can affect the student experience, to what degree, and how this understanding can help influence future programming. A positive experience that improves student confidence of understanding and course material has the potential to positively improve mental health and engagement in education; we hope that this research brings together the academic and lived-experiences of students through this work.

Curriculum Integration of the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges in a First-year Undergraduate Design Course Using Multi-layered Peer Learning: A Methodology

This paper introduces a methodology to investigate the impact of utilizing multilayered peer learning pedagogical strategies to integrate the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges into a large first-year engineering design course. The Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges (CEGC) evolved from the seventeen UN sustainable development goals (UNSDG). The CEGC focus on achieving access to safe water; resilient infrastructure; sustainable energy, industry, and cities; and inclusive STEM education. The incorporation of the CEGC into higher education can be viewed as a tool to empower students to understand the significance of engineering in society with respect to the achievement of the UNSDG. Consequently, their inclusion in the first-year engineering education curriculum serves to engage students with urgent and complex societal problems and the socio-contextual impact of engineering decisions and designs. Peer learning has regularly been applied as an active learning strategy, often with smaller class sizes. A multilayered peer learning strategy was implemented to engage students with the CEGC in a large class of ~1100 students. This strategy is reviewed with respect to delivery logistics and observed efficacy.

Communication as Design: How a Multimodal Assignment Establishes Communication’s Role in Engineering Design and Provides Stability to a Large Course System

This teaching practice paper describes and reflects on the Engineering Observation, a multimodal communication assignment in a first-year engineering communication and design course. The assignment is designed to accomplish two major goals. First, it fills a pedagogical gap by establishing multimodality and engineering discourse as the foundations of communications instruction and practice in the course, while also establishing communication as an integral part of—and not separate from—design practice. Second, it helps solve problems stemming from the complexity and scale common to large design courses by contributing to the systematic stability of the course. This second goal depends on framing such a course as a system, from the “ecological perspective.” These dual goals are found to be inherently connected, and deliberate care has been given to ensure that they are aligned, mutually supportive, and as effective as possible while ensuring that the assignment supports, and does not negatively impact, connected aspects of the course. Finally, I assess the assignment in its current iteration and consider future directions for the assignment itself as well as this research.

LEARNING ELECTRONICS THROUGH STORYTELLING

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) initiatives have expanded to include ‘art’ withthe moniker: STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). This acknowledges the importance of creativity in the technical fields and poses the question: How do we incorporate art into the engineering classroom? This paper presents one attempt to incorporate the artof storytelling in a first-year engineering design course in January 2021. It was found that compared with students who received a traditional lecture to learn basic electronicconcepts, the students who used an illustrated storybook to learn the same concepts took significantly less time to replicate a sample circuit (p < .001), and performed better in a post-activity assessment (p > .05). These results indicate that the use of storytelling can be an effective wayto transmit technical content in an engineering classroom, and further studies should be pursued.

OUTCOMES AND LESSONS FROM DEPLOYING DIGITAL NOTEBOOKS ACROSS A MULTI-SECTION ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE

The instructor team of large cohort, team- and project-based, first-year engineering design course were faced with a number of common and persistent challenges; effective modelling and scaffolding of the design process; realizing consistent content delivery, marking, and feedback across multiple sections; keeping student teams on track; capturing individual marks related to teamwork; and establishing good design notebook keeping practices. As part of continuing course updates, distributed digital notebooks including worksheets were progressively introduced to support project and team learning activities and individual assessment and feedback. This paper examines the outcomes and lessons learned from the increasingly expanded role these notebooks have taken and their impacts on both instructors and students. In practice, the digital project notebooks have shown themselves to be surprisingly versatile as a platform to 1) deliver course content, 2) enable regular evaluation of individual student participation, contribution, and/or understanding, 3) record and assess team-level progress on the project, and 4) capture and monitor the evolution of team plans and ongoing activities. However, there are some observed costs to the implementation approach taken so far, including potential loss of flexibility, inhibiting teams from taking initiative or learning to manage their own time and effort.

FROM STEM TO STEAM IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

Creativity, communication skills, interdisciplinary sensitivity, and cultural and civic responsibility are vital skills and perspectives to inculcate in contemporary engineering students. A number of studies have demonstrated the benefits of exposing engineering students to arts, as studying arts and humanities can open up their minds to creative ideas from great minds outside of science and engineering. In most cases, engineering students are exposed to the arts by taking a few non-technical courses as electives. Many students view these courses as less important and irrelevant to their field of studies. Integrating the arts into the technical engineering curriculum is challenging but critical to engineering design, particularly in early years, and represents a natural opportunity. This paper discusses the approach taken by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa of exposing students to the arts through curricular and extra-curricular design activities. These include offering design challenges, a first-year engineering design course and summer internships. This paper also discusses the challenges that arise in delivering such curriculum and the impact of such exposure on the engineering students involved.

FROM STEM TO STEAM IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

Creativity, communication skills, interdisciplinary sensitivity, and cultural and civic responsibility are vital skills and perspectives to inculcate in contemporary engineering students. A number of studies have demonstrated the benefits of exposing engineering students to arts, as studying arts and humanities can open up their minds to creative ideas from great minds outside of science and engineering. In most cases, engineering students are exposed to the arts by taking a few non-technical courses as electives. Many students view these courses as less important and irrelevant to their field of studies. Integrating the arts into the technical engineering curriculum is challenging but critical to engineering design, particularly in early years, and represents a natural opportunity. This paper discusses the approach taken by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa of exposing students to the arts through curricular and extra-curricular design activities. These include offering design challenges, a first-year engineering design course and summer internships. This paper also discusses the challenges that arise in delivering such curriculum and the impact of such exposure on the engineering students involved.

Motivating first-year engineering students through gamified homework

ABSTRACT Gamification has been applied in multiple different contexts for increasing motivation towards completion of activities such as company loyalty programs, exercise initiatives, and corporate training. Although gamification has been applied within engineering classrooms previously, very little results have been obtained on how gamification approaches can impact student academic motivation. This study applied an action research approach to the development of curricular content for an online gamification platform that could be used for homework in a first-year second semester engineering design course. During the two cycles performed, researchers learned from the students directly what elements of the platform appealed to them and helped with their learning process allowing the researchers to make active changes to the gamification platform throughout the semester as well as in between cycles to improve final outcomes. After completion of the second cycle of analysis, the researchers were able to create content for a gamification platform that has been shown to be able to empower students towards learning engineering material while providing them with the necessary support so that they can feel successful although further refinement based on student comments and feedback is still necessary. Students also felt that the content built into the platform was of interest to them and useful to their overall learning process. This study demonstrated the utility of using action research as a means to actively incorporate student feedback in the development of educational innovations leading to ongoing improvements and a final product that meets the intended needs of its target population.

VALUE OF LANGUAGE BACKGROUND ON IDEA GENERATION SESSIONS IN FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS

Abstract – An ongoing debate around classroom organization decisions, particularly with regard to team formation, involves the value associated with team-member diversity. Diversity can be defined, for example, in terms of discipline, marks, race, gender, language, age, experience, or goals. For the researchers in this case, this debate around the impact of diversity motivated further analysis of just what, if any, impact linguistic diversity had on teams in first-year engineering design courses. This is of particular concern given the dramatic increase in the percentage of multilingual students that make up current student bodies across Canada. Our analysis indicates that the effect of having non-native speakers of English (NNSE) on a team is not a de facto detriment to idea generation and discussions within the team. Thus, this paper reports on the effects of multilingualism on team dynamics and idea generation. The authors present here a subset of the data from of a much larger study on effective teamwork behaviours, that highlights two multilingual dominant teams from the larger study. The analysis examines how multilingualism and values associated with it contributed to and developed an integrated understanding of both the problem being addressed and potential solutions to that problem.

BEHAVIOURAL DIFFERENCES OF HIGH AND LOW PERFORMING TEAMS: A MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL STUDY OF FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS

Abstract – This paper compares student intra-team feedback to identify behaviours that differentiate high and low performing teams. Data from two universities’ first-year engineering design courses was analysed and demonstrated that the ways in which students discussed high and low performing teams was similar. This paper discusses some of the issues with which low performing teams struggled. Both high and low performing teams experienced a lack of quality and quantity of communication, whereas low-performing teams struggled with hoarding work, leveraging team members and supporting others. High-performing teams may have a more collective team mindset that values the skills and perspectives of all team members more.

INCORPORATING A COMMUNITY-BASED RAPID MANUFACTURING FACILITY INTO A FIRST YEAR ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE

University engineering departments are often challenged to maintain state of the art manufacturing facilities due to the rapid technological changes that are occurring in industry. Older or obsolete engineering laboratory equipment, manufacturing machines, and design tools are difficult to replace due to limited department budgets, space, and staff resources.At Capilano University, where a hands-on project-based one semester first year engineering design class is offered, the Engineering department has taken a novel approach to meet the above challenge.The Engineering Design students are required to design, build, and test original prototype electrical circuits, and mechanical structures as part of their design projects. Construction of these student-designed units requires a rapid turnaround manufacturing facility to meet the peak demands of the students, capabilities that smaller universities are often limited in their ability to provide.To meet this specific requirement, a community-based private rapid prototyping design and manufacturing facility, Zen Maker Labs, was approached, and a partnership agreement has been developed. The agreement consisted of cooperation between the university and the Zen Maker Lab to support up to 60 engineering design students. The students were provided with tools, safety training, and support for manufacturing. The facility has provided CAD design stations, several 3D printers, laser cutters, and numerically controlled milling machines to support manufacturing of student designs. Access to the manufacturing facility was initially provided on subscription basis, where students used the library to “sign-out” membership cards, and access the facility on a controlled, supervised basis. The controlling of student numbers through the university library provided a method for managing student access to themanufacturing facility over a period of 8-10 weeks. This arrangement for laboratory access has recently been expanded through a revised collaboration arrangement, and has provided engineering design students with handson experience with several manufacturing technologies and CAD engineering modelling and design tools.

USING AN ONLINE PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT TOOL TO OPTIMIZE FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING DESIGN TEAMS

This paper discusses a Canadian-made online cloud-based personality assessment tool, and its application in a first-year engineering design course at a large private US university. The motivation for this study is to develop an automated approach to maximizing diversity during team formation at the first-year level, while encouraging learning about differences in personality and their effect on teams. The study found that the CLUES software being used was a step towards greater understanding of differences, and that students who used the knowledge of personality during the team formation phase reported a greater sense of inclusivity.

Meaning-making and Lexicogrammatical Accuracy Relationships on Multilingual Engineering Teams

The present reliance on lexicogrammaticalaccuracy seems to be an impoverished construct on whichto assess students’ understanding and students’ ability toproductively interact and use engineering concepts inteam settings. I propose supplementing accuracy with theconcepts of agility and efficacy because meaning-makingseems to be more critical to a student’s ability tosuccessfully engage in the complex process ofcommunication than accuracy alone. However, beforethese can be assessed it is necessary to determine whatmeaning-making, agility and efficacy look like in practice.This study examines emergent meaning-making practicesof video-recorded team meetings in two first-yearengineering design courses. Analysis revealed thatlexicogrammatical accuracy did not reflect a team’s orindividual’s ability to communicate-to make meaning.

Triangulated authentic assessment in the HEQCO Learning Outcomes Assessment Consortium

The Higher Education Quality Council ofOntario (HEQCO) has established a consortium ofinstitutions committed to the development of usefullearning outcomes assessment techniques and to theirwide-scale implementation in their institutions. Queen'sUniversity is one of three universities and three collegesof the consortium, and the Faculty of Engineering andApplied Science (FEAS) is participating due to familiaritywith assessing learning outcomes as part of accreditation.The specific learning outcomes that are of interest toQueen's are Critical Thinking, Problem Solving,Communication and Lifelong learning.The goal of this three-year project is to assess theaforementioned general learning outcomes and cognitiveskills using three assessment methods simultaneously:embedded course assessment, using meta--rubrics toscore student artifacts, and using standardizedtests/surveys. The study will document cost and timerequired to access each of these methods in specificcourses, analyze correlation between scores from thethree methods, and evaluate developments of the genericlearning outcomes over the duration of a program. Weaim to ensure that the work of outcomes assessment issustainable, works within standard course contexts, andcan be integrated into regular course activities. Thepaper identifies the goals of the project, currentapproach, and an example of data collection in one firstyearengineering design course.

Engineering students' perceptions of team conflict and high-performance teams

Our study investigates the role of team conflict in the context of student design project work. We are interested in how students experience conflicts in a team environment and how these conflicts relate to other aspects of teamwork such as communication, division of work, shared goals, and leadership. We are using a mixed-method approach to data collection through peer-review data, team observations, and reflective memos. This paper reports results from a study implemented in a required first-year engineering design course. The majority of participants recognise the benefits that task and procedural conflicts have on team performance. Specifically, teamwork aspects such as communication, open-mindedness, and working towards a common goal were connected to cognitive conflict. The peer-review data illustrates that some class sections showed statistically significant improvements in goal commitment, idea communication during conflicts, conflict engagement and attentive listening over time. The results of the post-hoc tests further suggest that students in teams with a predominantly male composition (three males and one female) reported a statistically significant decrease in goal commitment and attentive listening during the ten-week evaluation period. Finally, methodologically we found that the reflective memos and team observations were better instruments for capturing team conflict, more so than peer-review surveys.

INFLUENCE OF LEARNING PREFERENCE ON SELF-EFFICACY AND PERFORMANCE IN MIXED-MODALITY FIRST-YEAR ENGINEERING DESIGN

All students have preferences for the way they receive and distribute information when the objective is learning. These preferences can be shown to have an effect on self-efficacy and on performance. The relationships between learning preference, self-efficacy and performance were studied using survey and grade data obtained from a first-year Engineering Design and Graphics course. The students were placed in one of three groups according to the modality (type) of design project they were given; a Simulation-Based project (SIM) using a software simulation tool, a Prototyping project (PRT) using a 3D printer, or a Simulation and Prototyping project (SAP) where they had to complete a design using both tools. Participants were given a custom survey that assessed self-efficacy and the VARK learning styles inventory which assesses learners on Visual, Aural, Read / Write and Kinesthetic learning preferences. 97 students were surveyed representing a response rate of 22.6%. Student performance was assessed by examining scores on a subset of questions related to design visualization on the final examination for the course. Data analysis involved examining the correlation between learning style and self-efficacy, and scores on final examination for each of the three course modality groups. Findings from this study include higher performance for Kinesthetic learners assigned a simulation-based project and low performance for Read/Write learners with a prototyping project. This study supports the hypothesis that student performance may depend on learning preferences coupled with design project modality.

Five Major Shifts in 100 Years of Engineering Education

In this paper, five major shifts in engineering education are identified. During the engineering science revolution, curricula moved from hands-on practice to mathematical modeling and scientific analyses. The first shift was initiated by engineering faculty members from Europe; accelerated during World War II, when physicists contributed multiple engineering breakthroughs; codified in the Grinter report; and kick-started by Sputnik. Did accreditation hinder curricular innovations? Were engineering graduates ready for practice? Spurred by these questions, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) required engineering programs to formulate outcomes, systematically assess achievement, and continuously improve student learning. The last three shifts are in progress. Since the engineering science revolution may have marginalized design, a distinctive feature of engineering, faculty members refocused attention on capstone and first-year engineering design courses. However, this third shift has not affected the two years in between. Fourth, research on learning and education continues to influence engineering education. Examples include learning outcomes and teaching approaches, such as cooperative learning and inquiry that increase student engagement. In shift five, technologies (e.g., the Internet, intelligent tutors, personal computers, and simulations) have been predicted to transform education for over 50 years; however, broad transformation has not yet been observed. Together, these five shifts characterize changes in engineering education over the past 100 years.

A COMPETENCY-BASED, STUDENT-CENTERED ASSESSMENT MODEL FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN

The new first-year engineering design and communications course at the University of Calgary has adopted a competency-based, student-centered model for assessing learning. Satisfactory performance in this course requires mastery of core competencies in four categories: ability to function as a member of a team, ability to contribute effectively to product or process design, ability to communicate effectively using the written word, ability to communicate effectively through the medium of drawing. Every assignment in the course is aimed at evaluating one (or more) of the core competencies from these categories. Student work is assessed as Excellent, Good, or Requires Additional Work. Because our focus is on competency, we permit students to redo any of their work to achieve a better assessment. Students must achieve the minimum of a Good on every assignment to have established competency and pass the course. Students can also redo assignments to move from a Good to Excellent assessment. Students compile term work into portfolios. The portfolios illustrate the progression of learning to both instructors and students. Students also use the portfolio to highlight their design and communication abilities to future employers. The new competency-based approach used at the University of Calgary is more effective than traditional assessment models because it requires students to learn from one another and to reflect on their learning. Students receive feedback by following a four-step process: 1) Comparison to posted examples of student work, 2) Discussion with other students, 3) Generation of a written self-assessment, 4) Feedback on self-assessment by instructors. This assessment approach reinforces the skills needed for engineering design.