Collaborative Research: Evaluating the Impact of Teaching Function in an Engineering Design Curriculum

这一改进的本科生STEM教育(IUSE)项目将有助于提高工科学生设计系统和流程以满足消费者需求的能力。科学和工程方面的持续创新对国家安全、经济增长和实现可持续社会至关重要。至关重要的是，工程教育不能只教授工程科学和分析：工程师必须能够设计、创造和创新。功能建模是一种提高工程设计技能的工具，但很少有经验数据表明功能建模如何改进工程设计，或者如何以一种使学生成为更好的设计师的方式教授功能建模。这项建议的总体目标是确定教学功能对工科学生设计综合能力的影响。结果将提高工程教育项目培养工程专业毕业生的能力，这些毕业生能够有效地创新和开发新产品，以满足新兴的国家需求。大多数工程设计教材讨论并规定了功能识别和某种形式的建模作为工程设计过程中的一个步骤，但只有零星证据表明，在设计过程中学习功能建模的学生会成为更好的设计师。这个项目将通过测量学生的以下能力来调查功能建模技能和设计结果之间的关系：(1)在构思过程中探索解决方案空间，(2)生成高质量的设计，以及(3)表示和理解工程系统。这项工作将检验三个假设：(1)功能建模技能在设计任务的概念生成阶段增加设计备选方案的数量、种类、质量和新颖性；(2)功能建模技能提高顶峰课程中最终设计的质量，由一组教师和行业专家判断；以及(3)功能建模技能提高学生理解和表示系统的能力。该项目包括努力向更广泛的工程教育界传播这项工作的成果。

This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project will help improve the ability of engineering students to design systems and processes to meet consumer needs. Continued innovation in science and engineering is critical to national security, economic growth, and achieving a sustainable society. It is crucial that engineering education move beyond teaching only engineering science and analysis: engineers must be able to design, create, and innovate. Functional modeling is a tool that improves engineering design skills, but little empirical data can be found that demonstrates how functional modeling improves engineering designs or how to teach functional modeling in a way that makes students better designers. The overall objective of this proposal is to determine the impact of teaching function on engineering students' design synthesis abilities. Results will improve the ability of engineering education programs to develop engineering graduates that are able to effectively innovate and develop new products to meet emerging national needs.Most engineering design texts discuss and prescribe functional recognition and some form of modeling as a step in the engineering design process, yet it is only anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who are taught functional modeling during the design process become better designers. This project will investigate the relationships between functional modeling skill and design outcomes by measuring the ability of students to (1) explore the solution space during ideation, (2) generate high quality designs, and (3) represent and understand engineered systems. This work will test three hypotheses: (1) Functional modeling skills increase the quantity, variety, quality, and novelty of design alternatives during the concept generation phase of a design task; (2) Functional modeling skills increase the quality of a final design in a capstone course as judged by a group of faculty and industry experts; and (3) Functional modeling skills increase students' ability to understand and represent a system. The project includes efforts to disseminate the results of this work to the broader engineering education community.