Collaborative Research: Evidence-based Pedagogy in Engineering Education: Design Heuristics for Concept Generation

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The engineering design ability is critical in all undergraduate engineering programs. Design fixation is one of the common problems facing engineering design teams. This project is creating and evaluating tools that will help the design group avoid the design fixation problem. The work is taking a unique approach to the problem by creating 77 heuristics to help design groups avoid the fixation problem. The technique is based on prior studies involving both student and professional teams. This prior work has demonstrated the technique is applicable to both design groups. The prior success provides a high level of confidence that this work will be successful. Because design is included in all engineering programs and because the design heuristics are rather generic the work pre performed in this project is applicable to virtually all engineering programs nationally. As a result a successful result in this project could be a transformative innovation for engineering education.This project is also producing instructional workshops to help instructors utilize the heuristics to enhance creativity in design courses. The workshops are not single point in time delivery of information but are distributed throughout time providing a long-term engagement of faculty. This type of prolonged engagement has proven to be more effective than other means of development and will produce excellent long term change.