First-year Engineering Design Research Articles

First-Year Project-Based Engineering Design Courses in Canadian Institutions

First-year engineering design courses are fundamental component to most engineering programs, and they provide the backbone for the introduction of engineering students to engineering practice and profession. First-year engineering design courses are also essential to begin the development of an engineering mindset. The purpose of this study is to complete a comparative examination of first-year engineering design courses across Canada. The work was inspired by an interactive workshop delivered at CEEA-ACEG 2022. The workshop was based on a comparative examination of the curriculum and delivery of three first-year design courses at different engineering institutions, including number of students and credits, project types, content integration, resources, and logistics. Informed by the discussion in the workshop, this study expands on the work by surveying instructors of first-year engineering design courses. The preliminary results are presented from a subset of the data collected and demonstrate similarities and differences among the different programs. These results provide a foundation for meaningful analysis and discussion of educational practice in first-year engineering design courses.

Integrating Stakeholder Interactions into First-Year Design Courses: Perceived Value & Impact on Students

Incorporating stakeholders into engineering design courses is important but challenging. A case-study-based approach of integrating stakeholder interactions into first-year engineering design courses was studied with the hypothesis that students would see value in stakeholder interactions. First-year students in two programs, Systems Design Engineering (SYDE, n=120) and Biomedical Engineering (BME, n=100), completed a beginning and end of term survey to understand their perceptions of stakeholder interactions in their first-semester engineering design course. The vast majority (96 to 98%) of students indicated that stakeholder interactions should persist in first-semester engineering design courses. Both cohorts placed high importance on stakeholders as an information source. However, BME students placed higher value in stakeholder interactions than their SYDE peers. This may relate to stakeholder alignment and interaction modality. While stakeholder interactions were effectively integrated into these courses, future work includes assessing effectiveness in different cohorts and developing a program-level plan for advancing stakeholder interactions.

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.

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.

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.

What Factors Impact Psychological Safety in Engineering Student Teams? A Mixed-Method Longitudinal Investigation

Abstract Although teamwork is being integrated throughout engineering education because of the perceived benefits of teams, the construct of psychological safety has been largely ignored in engineering research. This omission is unfortunate because psychological safety reflects collective perceptions about how comfortable team members feel in sharing their perspectives, and it has been found to positively impact team performance in samples outside of engineering. While prior research has indicated that psychological safety is positively related to team performance and outcomes, research related to psychological safety in engineering teams is less established. There is also a lack of comprehensive methodologies that capture the dynamic changes that occur throughout the design process and at each time point. In light of this, the goal of the current study was to understand how psychological safety might be measured practically and reliably in engineering student teams over time. In addition, we sought to identify factors that impact the building and waning of psychological safety in these teams over time. This was accomplished through a study with 260 engineering students in 68 teams in a first-year engineering design class. The psychological safety of the teams was captured for each team over five time points over the course of a semester long design project. The results of this study provide some of the first evidence on the reliability of psychological safety in engineering teams and offer insights as to how to support and improve psychological safety.

No time for that? An investigation of mindfulness and stress in first-year engineering design

Abstract Engineering design induces mental stress for students and the sources of stress for each stage of design are unique. Therefore, strategies are needed to manage the stress of engineering design that are applicable across the design process. This study investigated the effect of a brief mindfulness-based intervention on first-year students’ cognitive stress during concept generation, concept selection and physical modelling. It was found that the mindfulness-based intervention did increase one aspect of students’ state mindfulness (though the effect was small). While prior work indicates that increased mindfulness can lower perceived stress, the increase in students’ state mindfulness during this study was not found to have an observable impact on students’ stress experience. However, students were receptive to completing a mindfulness-based activity in-class and perceived multiple benefits. Physical modelling was the most stressful of the design tasks while concept generation and concept selection produced similar levels of stress. Students used five reoccurring mechanisms for coping with the stress of design including focusing on the task, minimising the importance of their performance, breathing, taking a break and avoidance/distraction. More research should be conducted with longer duration mindfulness-based interventions to understand their potential as a stress management strategy for engineering design.

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.

An Exploration of First Year Pre-service Engineering Graphics and Design Teachers’ Spatial Visualisation Ability at a University of Technology

The critical shortage of engineers in South Africa is linked directly to the schooling systems’ inability to develop fundamental skills required in engineering courses, such as spatial visualization ability. Not much is known on the factors that enable or constrain the development of students’ spatial visualization skills. This study aimed to explore first-year Engineering Graphics and Design (EGD) Pre-Service Teachers’ (PSTs) spatial visualization skills and the factors that enables or constrains their spatial visualization skills. A mixed-method approached was used to generate data. Data were from twenty-one first year EGD PSTs at a University of Technology, in Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. The participants were purposively selected to participate in the study. The Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Visualization of Rotations (PSVT: R) was used as a benchmark to establish participants level of spatial visualization skills. Collages and focus group interviews were used to explore the factors that enabled or constrained PSTs spatial visualization skills. The PSVT test results was analysed and categorized as per rotation. Qualitative data were subjected to content analysis. The findings of this study differ from that of other studies on student’s spatial visualization skills. Other studies provide consistent evidence that male students have better developed spatial visualization skills than females. First-year female participants in this study have higher scores than male participants in the PSVT:R. The factors that enhanced female students’ spatial visualization ability were playing with Legos, enjoying mathematics, working with indigenous patterns while teachers and violence at schools constrained the development of spatial visualization skills.

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 Minute Papers to Determine Student Cognitive Development Levels.

Can anonymous written feedback collected during classroom assessment activities be used to assess students' cognitive development levels? After library instruction in a first-year engineering design class, students submitted minute papers that included answers to "what they are left wondering." Responses were coded into low, medium and high categories correlated to cognitive stages following a codebook that was developed based largely on Perry's model and on two semesters' worth of prior student feedback. Preliminary analysis suggests that subjects exhibit characteristics in keeping with the range of cognitive levels identified by previous research at this institution, but that they tend to be weighted toward the lower end of the spectrum. While this study does not reveal cognitive development levels as reliably as the work of previous researchers, it does propose an easy method for identifying general cognitive development levels of student cohorts and offers recommendations for using this knowledge to improve instructional effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.