Teaching requirements: Can a short lecture make a real difference?

This study explores the influence that an educational intervention has on students generating requirements for a design task. An experiment was performed in a fourth-year mechanical engineering design course by giving the participants a design problem from which they had to generate a list of requirements. A lecture on requirements was given and then the students were given a second problem. The two problems were tested for similarity. The data was evaluated using ideation metrics of variety, novelty, and quantity adapted to this study. Variety was assessed using eighteen categories to classify each requirement. Novelty was evaluated on the level of uniqueness of the requirement against the complete set generated, based on both syntax and semantic filtering. Findings suggest that the lecture had a positive impact on the students in increasing the variety of the requirement. All novel requirements belonged to the activity performed after lecture. Finally, the quantity of the requirements generated after the lecture were found to be statistically significantly higher. It is shown through a second study that the students before the lecture performed similarly to practicing engineers with three or more years of experience. This suggests that using undergraduate students in the final year of their program may be adequate as surrogates for engineering practitioners for requirement identification studies. This is an important methodological contribution for the engineering design research community to justify the use of students as participants in experimental studies.