Jim Borgford-Parnell

Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research: Engineering Design Education

Introduction Designing is a key component of professional practice in many fields of human endeavor (e.g., architecture, engineering, industrial design, art, and literature). For engineers, designing integrates engineering knowledge, skill, and vision in the pursuit of innovations to solve problems and enable modern life. With this understanding, engineering educators have, for several decades, been infusing their programs with design curricula and pedagogical experiences in order to enhance the design competencies of engineering graduates. Paralleling the development of these curricula and experiences, a growing body of research has been providing a scholarly basis for engineering design education. The goal of this chapter is to acquaint readers with engineering design education research and practice. To situate engineering design education in the larger context, we first present a brief history of research on design processes across several fields and then move to a more specific description of research on engineering design processes. We then focus on research that investigates effective ways to teach and assess the design process and review curricular structures and pedagogies that are commonly used in undergraduate engineering programs.

A pedagogy of larger concerns used as a lens to reflect on the design of student learning experiences

ABSTRACT Although engineering educational endeavours are often described with regard to how well they prepare students to meet national or global engineering concerns, the purpose of this paper is to show how those efforts can also serve the larger educational goals of the educators themselves as they develop learning experiences for their students. This paper describes the reflections of four engineering educators who used a research-based ‘Pedagogy of Larger Concerns’ (PLC) as a conceptual lens for examining important aspects of their courses. A PLC is a set of teaching conceptions that was identified in a study exploring the thinking of outstanding professors in order to improve our understanding of the basis of their effectiveness.

A Case Study of Using Capstone Design as Basis for Curriculum-Wide Project-Based Learning

This paper describes an NSF funded project in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department at the University of Missouri. A primary goal of this project is to systematically increase project-based learning (PBL) experiences throughout the MAE curriculum. To accomplish this goal, recent capstone design projects that need further refinements serve as the basis for PBL activities throughout the MAE curriculum. A major tool for facilitating these refinement efforts is a new senior/graduate Design Management course in which each student in this course learns how to plan and manage design projects. These students then implement their learning by serving as project team managers in the courses in which the refinement activities are being conducted. This paper provides a detailed case study of five refinements to one capstone design that took place in four different MAE courses during the Spring 2011 semester. The paper describes a Fall 2009 capstone project that consisted of designing a portable wood chipper. The student design was very promising, leading to a chipper with significantly greater chipping capacity than commercially available chippers of the same size and weight. However, several faculty members reviewed the results and identified additional opportunities for refining the design. This paper describes activities during Spring 2011 when students in four different MAE courses developed refinements to the original design. The roles of the Design Management students in these activities are discussed. The paper also includes a discussion of the methods and findings of the formative assessment process, including interviews with, and surveys of, faculty and students.Copyright