An introduction to engineering design: teaching the engineering process through teaming and the continuous improvement philosophy

Summary form only given, as follows. We describe a first year required course in engineering design, initiated at ASU in the Fall'94 semester. The organizing thread and philosophy for the course is the process of engineering, utilizing teaming and continuous improvement, based on Deming's fourteen points. Process is defined as a collection of interrelated tasks that take one from input to output in the engineering environment. The course has three components: Process Concepts, Design Laboratory, and Computer Modeling. In the concepts section, the emphasis is on a problem solving heuristic similar to the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act process or the Boeing Seven Step problem solving process. The concepts section meets once a week for two hours in a large, multimedia classroom with a center podium and tables for teams of four students. The capacity of the concepts class is 120 students. The design laboratory component of the class has two main portions: (1) A Mechanical Dissection and Reassembly of an Artifact, in which the reassembly process is developed, documented, and evaluated using community volunteers for testing, and (2) An Artifact Design for Reproducible Performance in which an object is designed, constructed, and evaluated. In the Fall '94 semester students dissected a telephone for the reassembly process and constructed a mouse trap powered model airplane launcher for the artifact design process. In the computer modeling component of the course, students learn how to develop models conceptually and then evaluate these models with Excel spreadsheets and TKSolver. Nine different computer models are generated and evaluated in this portion of the course, which meets in a computer classroom which contains approximately 25 computers. The class combines active learning and technology enhanced education. More details of the course content and the assessment and evaluation of the student performance will be described in the talk.