Open-ended Design Projects Research Articles

Developing and assessing a collaborative open-ended design project with a renewable energy focus in an introductory thermal sciences course

This paper describes the development and assessment of a collaborative open-ended design project for a second-year Introduction to Thermal Sciences course, in which groups had to design a renewable energy portfolio that would meet the University of San Diego's energy needs. The project was broken into three individual tasks, and the deliverables were a technical report and an oral presentation. Final reports submitted by groups in spring 2022 were directly assessed using rubrics to determine the efficacy of the project at meeting four of the student outcomes addressed by the course (1—ability to solve complex engineering problems, 2—ability to apply the engineering design process, 4—consider the impact of engineering solutions, and 7—ability to acquire and apply new knowledge). Four out of the six groups achieved student outcome 1, and five of the groups achieved student outcomes 2, 4, and 7. A self- and peer-evaluation form was used to indirectly assess student outcome 5—ability to function effectively on a team, and results showed that 27 of the 29 students achieved the outcome. Indirect assessment was performed using an anonymous survey instrument, and students’ responses about how the project improved their abilities in all skills that were assessed were statistically different from neutral in the positive direction. Students’ responses about their perception of the project organization, tasks expectations, timing, and difficulty were also statistically different from neutral in the positive direction. Open-ended feedback indicated that students appreciated learning about renewable energy, having real data from a realistic customer, and the amount of autonomy they were given.

Using Educational Technology to Enhance Creative and Critical Thinking Skills Through Open Ended Design Projects

Using Educational Technology to Enhance Creative and Critical Thinking Skills Through Open Ended Design Projects

Introductory Engineering Decision-Making: Guiding First-Year Students to Relativism in Software Design

Contribution: A semester-long, open-ended design project was implemented to promote intellectual development of first-year students while reinforcing event-driven/procedural programming principles. This paper describes this approach, and an evaluation strategy using Perry’s model for intellectual development. The results show that students can reach the relativism stage of Perry’s model in their first year of studies. Background: Students must move beyond a dualistic worldview to be engineers. Felder and Brent provided a list of recommendations to promote this type of intellectual development in students; active learning strategies strongly align with these recommendations. While active learning is common in programming courses (sometimes taking the form of project-based learning), they are typically tightly controlled by the instructor, and limited in scope (both in time and complexity), potentially reducing their impact on students. Intended Outcomes: This course and term-long project provided students a supportive environment in which to develop their decision-making skills, and promoted their intellectual development through Perry’s stages related to software design. Application Design: Aligned with Felder and Brent’s recommendations and Kuh’s High Impact Practices, a course was built to: 1) teach students procedural programming, with 2) a focus on software design and open-ended problem solving, while maintaining 3) a supportive environment for skill acquisition. Findings: A mixed methods study showed the majority of students align themselves with the relativism stage of intellectual development at the end of the course. This study also illuminated the decision-making processes of teams of students in a first-year software design course.

Remodelling an engineering design subject to enhance students’ learning outcomes

This paper presents details of remodelling of an engineering design subject to enhance students’ learning outcome. The subject is offered for second year mechanical engineering undergraduates in the first semester of the academic year. The basic objective of the subject is to introduce the engineering design practice and to build up the essential skills to carry out open-ended engineering design projects systematically. Before remodelling, the subject had been taught and assessed mainly with the use of techniques normally used for knowledge building subjects. Students were given only limited opportunities to actively engage with the content, peers and the facilitator in-class. Considering the reserved nature of Hong Kong students, the subject was remodelled by incorporating carefully selected active learning methods. The scaffolded knowledge integration framework for instructional design is extensively used for this subject remodelling exercise. The remodelled subject was delivered and the learning outcome achievements were assessed using pre and post survey questionnaires, focus group discussion and individual student’s performance records. The assessment results indicate that the new approach of subject delivery and assessment methods are more effective in achieving intended learning outcomes and well accepted by the students.

Undergraduate design students’ experience of risk-taking in an open-ended design project

In this article we investigate the student experience of risk-taking in an open-ended design project that appeared to be ideally suited to encourage risk-taking. The article is informed by a phenomenological case study documenting student experience of risk-taking during a concentrated, week-long design project. The data revealed multiple instances where students had taken risks and how they had experienced risk-taking. Three significant aspects of risk-taking in design education were identified in the data and explored. The first aspect considers how the students’ experience correlated with a theoretical educational approach that encourages risk-taking. The second provides a broad overview of the students’ experience of risk-taking during the project. The third draws out common student experiences that highlight that risk-taking is often prompted by the undefined and unexpected elements of a project and gaps in student knowledge, experience and skills.

A Tool for Formative Assessment and Learning in a Graphics Design Course: Adaptive Comparative Judgement

Improving graphics education may begin with understanding best practices for providing, receiving, and improving formative feedback. Challenges related to anonymity, efficiency, and validity in peer critique settings all contribute to a difficult-to-implement process. This research investigates university-level computer graphics students while engaged in adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ), as a formative learning, assessment, and feedback tool, during several open-ended graphics design projects. A control group of students wrote feedback on papers in small group critiques while the experimental group students participated in ACJ, acting as judges of peer work and providing and receiving feedback to, and from, their peers. Relationships between the paper-based group approach and the ACJ approach and student achievement were explored. Further, this paper discusses the potential benefits, and challenges, of using ACJ as a formative assessment and peer feedback tool as well as student impressions of both approaches toward peer formative assessment and feedback.

Teaching Sustainable Energy and Power Electronics to Engineering Students in a Laboratory Environment Using Industry-Standard Tools

Power electronics and renewable energy are two important topics for today's power engineering students. In many cases, the two topics are inextricably intertwined. As the renewable energy sector grows, the need for engineers qualified to design such systems grows as well. In order to train such engineers, new courses are needed that highlight the unique engineering challenges presented by renewable energy systems. This paper presents the theory, implementation, and assessment of a new laboratory course designed to teach power electronics and renewable energy to engineering students. A key element of the course is the use of real renewable energy systems in the laboratory setting. Students design, test, and troubleshoot power electronic circuits (such as dc/dc converters and pulse-width-modulated inverters) with tools used widely in industry (such as MATLAB/Simulink and dSPACE digital signal processors). Ten unique experiments are presented, as well as detailed descriptions of two open-ended design projects: a maximum power point tracker for a photovoltaic array and a full converter for a permanent-magnet wind turbine. Results from students' work on the experiments and final projects, as well as an assessment of the effectiveness of the course based on pre- and post-testing, are also presented.

A Laboratory-Centered Approach to Introducing Engineering Students to Electric Circuit and Electric Systems Concepts

The teaching of electric circuit analysis traditionally involves problem solving to ensure understanding of analysis theorems, complemented by laboratory experience. When taught to first year Engineering students, this approach lacks a motivational component and presents difficulties due to the weaker mathematics and problem solving skills of first year students. This paper presents a laboratory-centered approach to introduce engineering students to electric devices and systems. Using open-ended design projects, students explore and construct different types of electrical systems. Laboratories are selected so as to develop student intuition in electrical concepts, scientific fundamentals, provide a historical background, and demonstrate systems-level design issues. Over the past three years in our Department, using this approach, increased student motivation and engagement has been observed, supported by a significant increase in Electrical and Computer Engineering enrollment.

AN INQUIRY AND BLENDED LEARNING MODULE FOR SENIOR ENGINEERING DESIGN

University of Calgary delivers a full-year “Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Design Methodology and Application” course where students gain basic design methodology knowledge and associated skills through lectures and tutorials. The primary “vehicle” used for student experiential learning is a team-based, open-ended design project. The problem often encountered is that students fail to see “the forest for the trees”. More specifically, they often fail to see how the design process applies to their project and potentially miss the main message of the course. This paper proposes a short inquiry based learning exercise, augmented with web-based teaching modules, to more effectively prepare students for the “application” aspect of the course. Student teams will experience the full design methodology through a compressed “mini-project” at the beginning of the term, before they have any preconceived notions about the design process. Mind-mapping has been identified as the e-learning tool to organize this mini-project. A pilot project testing the use of mind-maps was conducted in a first year design course, exploring issues related to its implementation.

A novel approach in integrating product design into curriculum: Toy and entertainment animatron design

This paper presents a novel approach in integrating the product development process into curriculum by utilizing the complex toy and entertainment development areas. A cross-disciplinary course targeting engineering, technology, and art students was designed and offered to accomplish animatronic toy development and entertainment job-shop practices within educational settings. The curriculum was comprised of the following content in the following sequence: introduction to product design, project management and team-work basics, concept development, artistic and industrial design, material and manufacturing process selection, mechanism design and assembly, actuators, sensors, controls, and programming. Mini-lessons were complemented by laboratories sessions, leading to an open-ended design project. Analytical tools and visual means such as engineering graphics, videos/animations, or working models were employed to address different learning styles during the mini-lessons.

Bridging the Gap between Academics and Practice: A Capstone Design Experience

As part of graduation requirements, the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison requires a minimum of one three credits course in a capstone design experience. The main objective of this course is to allow students the opportunity of undertaking and completing an open-ended design project. Supervision of the projects is performed by practicing engineers and department faculty. The course is a practice oriented design class that integrates several civil engineering areas. Special emphasis is placed on integrating constructability concepts with structural engineering, mechanical systems, electrical systems, and other project details. Student groups not only complete project designs, but also perform feasibility studies, value engineering, and prepare a construction schedule and cost estimate based on the designs they have generated. The objective of this paper is to describe the senior level capstone design experience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Container-Handling Crane: A First-Year Engineering Student Project

This paper describes a project suitable for first-year undergraduate engineering students, which integrates civil, electrical, and mechanical engineering concepts into an open-ended design and construction project. The project is a model crane, which simulates a shipping container handling system and is suitable for inter-team competition. The design criteria, materials, and competition rules are presented. As well, a series of short lecture topics, demonstrations, and facilitating homework assignments are outlined. This project and the associated supporting materials meet the goals of being relatively inexpensive while exposing the students to a broader perspective of the engineering profession and retaining their interest in engineering.

Techniques in a pseudocorporate environment [engineering education

This paper describes a strategy which was developed to effect desired behavioral change in a junior year electronics design laboratory course, corequisite to a second electronics course. Since any such strategy requires a schedule of reinforcement, the setting of the course was changed to that of a new employee orientation and probationary program with the instructor serving as Manager of Engineering and the Teaching Assistants serving as staff engineer-mentors. A pseudocorporate philosophy was adopted and rigorously implemented, including standards for written and oral communications, corporate e-mail and performance evaluations. Open-ended design projects were assigned by memos giving customer needs including electrical power and cost constraints. Initial student feedback indicates that, despite time constraints, this approach not only forces students to face open-ended design problems and professional communications in a new may, but also confronts them with the need to achieve a certain of intuitive understanding of the subject as opposed to the memorization of equations and problem unique solution patterns.

The design of laboratory experiments and projects for mechatronics courses

The widening recognition of the need to educate mechanical and other non-electrical engineers in the application of electronics, microprocessors and software to the design of products has led to the creation of Mechatronics courses at many universities. These courses aim to produce engineers capable of successfully employing all of these technologies in the design of electromechanical, or Mechatronic systems. This paper describes a set of heuristic guidelines that have been developed and employed to aid in the design and review of laboratory experiments and open-ended design projects for use in Mechatronics courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The context of the courses in which these guidelines were developed is described and some examples of the experiments and projects that have resulted are presented.

How to Teach Engineering and Industrial Design: a U.K. Experience

Abstract Within the U.K. there has, over recent years, been a strong correlation between the lack of total design literacy of graduate engineers and the decline of the U.K. manufacturing industry. With the formation of the Engineering Council and the mandatory requirement of design studies in undergraduate courses, this trend is being reversed. Unfortunately the inclusion of industrial design is being ignored. The paper explores the possibilities of teaching engineering, whatever the discipline, through an open-ended design project approach at all years of a course. The use of CAD and professional facilities are recommended to be appropriate 'within a student-centred learning environment. However, staff attitudes to a total design activity—not engineering or industrial design only—have to change radically for the engineering graduate to leave higher education with an appropriate toolkit of knowledge and skills. The paper concludes that specific engineering/product design undergraduate courses are essential to meeting the immediate and future needs of U.K. industry.