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

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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.