Who, What, and When? Exploring Student Focus in the Capstone Design Experience
Who, What, and When? Exploring Student Focus in the Capstone Design Experience
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谁、什么、什么时候？
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
K. Lewis
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Zachary Ball;Jonathan T Bessette;K. Lewis
产品开发是许多大学通过顶峰设计课程教授的工程教育的关键组成部分。本课程为学生提供了将新学到的工程学知识应用于设计、建造和测试工作样机的机会。这种教育方法还鼓励学生将更多的注意力放在时间和小组管理上。在整个设计过程中，学生的关注点在小组组织、产品开发和课程交付成果之间波动。本文观察了这种焦点的变化，以提取与谁在关注什么以及何时关注什么相关的关键见解。数据是以每个学生的个人项目日记的形式收集的，这些日记提供了整个学期的设计活动的详细情况，以便每周都有重点图。每个学生的重点是通过每个学生每周日记条目的主题分布来量化的，该主题分布使用潜在的Dirichlet分配自动提取。我们的结果侧重于话题识别的准确性和解释，在识别趋势之前发现，表现优异的学生和群体与表现不佳的学生和群体分开。研究发现，专注于所需课程交付内容的有效时间管理和团队凝聚力导致了最具影响力的表现差异。利用这些知识，我们确定了支持顶石项目的教育学的未来方向。
Product development is a key component of engineering education taught at a number of universities through their capstone design course. This course provides students with an opportunity to apply their newly obtained knowledge in engineering to design, build, and test working prototypes. This educational approach also encourages students to place additional attention on time and group management. As students walk through the design process, their focus fluctuates between group organization, product development, and course deliverables. This paper observes this variation in focus to extract key insights related to who is focusing on what and when. Data was collected in the form of individual project journals for each student and these provide a detailed look into the design activities throughout the semester allowing for a focus mapping from week to week. The focus of each student is quantified by a topic distribution of each student’s weekly journal entries, automatically extracted using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Our results place emphasis on the topic identification accuracy and interpretation, before identifying trends found that separate high performing students and groups from those with poor performances. It was found that efficient time management focusing on the required course deliverables, and group cohesion led to the most impactful performance variations. Using this knowledge, we identify future directions supporting the pedagogy for capstone projects.