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

工程设计能力在所有本科工程课程中都是至关重要的。设计定势是工程设计团队面临的常见问题之一。这个项目正在创建和评估工具，以帮助设计组避免设计固定问题。这项工作采取了一种独特的方法来解决这个问题，创建了77个启发式方法来帮助设计团队避免固定问题。这项技术是基于之前涉及学生和专业团队的研究。这项先前的工作已经证明该技术适用于这两个设计组。先前的成功使人们对这项工作将取得成功充满了高度的信心。由于设计包含在所有工程计划中，而且设计启发式方法是相当通用的，因此本项目中预先执行的工作几乎适用于全国所有的工程计划。因此，这个项目的成功可能是工程教育的一次变革性的创新。该项目还制作了教学研讨会，帮助教师利用启发式方法来提高设计课程的创造力。这些研讨会不是单一时间点的信息传递，而是分布在整个时间段，为教师提供长期的参与。事实证明，这种长期参与比其他发展手段更有效，并将产生极好的长期变化。

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.