Improving Novelty and Quality During Introductory Mechanical Design Competitions

Author(s):  
Daniela Faas ◽  
Shuya Gong

This study explores whether changing design objectives during introductory mechanical engineering courses would improve design novelty and quality when these courses offer a competition element. Design fixation can occur when students are presented with the same design objective because the institutionalized “best” solutions are transferred from semester to semester and student to student. Design competitions are a popular way to teach the design and construction components, often with a focus on robotics. Some competitions are newly designed and rebuilt every single semester, requiring advanced planning and often high budgets. Others reuse a similar competition from year to year without any changes to the design objectives. This paper tries to answer whether or not students are building more novel designs when the competition changes from semester to semester. In this study, robots from four different configurations for a design-and-build activity were analyzed. The unchanged design prompt and 3 semesters of different design prompts were included in the study. The evaluations of the robots were based on the performance of the robots, the type and quality of the designs, and the relationship between the design competition and the robots. Results from this study suggest that changing design objectives (i.e. challenges found in a robotic competition) allows for a wider variation in the designs. While the average novelty did not change, students were no longer limited to and fixated on a very small range of designs.

Author(s):  
Daniela Faas ◽  
Robert D. Howe

Freshman/sophomore design projects provide students with hands-on experiences in conceptual design and manufacturing. For some of these courses, a design competition is used to teach the design and construction components. These competitions are often reused from semester to semester, so the students typically suffer from design fixation. When design competition tables are erected new every single semester, it requires advanced planning and high budgets. This paper discusses a case study of a different structure for introductory design courses and competitions at Harvard. We summarize a yearlong effort to improve an existing early design competition with more machine component elements and linkage design. The goal of a interchangeable design competition was to prevent design fixation while at the same time providing boundaries for students to successfully implement their robot designs, independent of their previous mechanical engineering exposure.


Author(s):  
Alexander LeGendre ◽  
Trina C. Kershaw ◽  
Rebecca L. Peterson ◽  
Sankha Bhowmick

The goal of the current work was to supplement our existing work on creativity with work on a key design hurdle: fixation. Design fixation was measured based on six features of a litter collector that was used as a physical example for students who were asked to design a ‘next generation litter collector’. We found that certain example features occurred more commonly than others. If less common features were present in a design, chances were greater that the design was highly fixated. Across the Mechanical Engineering program, mean fixation decreased for seniors compared to other students. Fixation and originality had an inverse correlation, although less so for seniors compared to freshmen. This is the first study that may provide insights into how design fixation can impede originality.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Meessen ◽  
Verena Mainz ◽  
Siegfried Gauggel ◽  
Eftychia Volz-Sidiropoulou ◽  
Stefan Sütterlin ◽  
...  

Abstract. Recently, Garfinkel and Critchley (2013) proposed to distinguish between three facets of interoception: interoceptive sensibility, interoceptive accuracy, and interoceptive awareness. This pilot study investigated how these facets interrelate to each other and whether interoceptive awareness is related to the metacognitive awareness of memory performance. A sample of 24 healthy students completed a heartbeat perception task (HPT) and a memory task. Judgments of confidence were requested for each task. Participants filled in questionnaires assessing interoceptive sensibility, depression, anxiety, and socio-demographic characteristics. The three facets of interoception were found to be uncorrelated and interoceptive awareness was not related to metacognitive awareness of memory performance. Whereas memory performance was significantly related to metamemory awareness, interoceptive accuracy (HPT) and interoceptive awareness were not correlated. Results suggest that future research on interoception should assess all facets of interoception in order to capture the multifaceted quality of the construct.


2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Arnold ◽  
A. V. Ranchor ◽  
N. H. T. ten Hacken ◽  
G. H. Koeter ◽  
V. Otten ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (12) ◽  
pp. 52-58
Author(s):  
E.P. Meleshkina ◽  
◽  
S.N. Kolomiets ◽  
A.S. Cheskidova ◽  
◽  
...  

Objectively and reliably determined indicators of rheological properties of the dough were identified using the alveograph device to create a system of classifications of wheat and flour from it for the intended purpose in the future. The analysis of the relationship of standardized quality indicators, as well as newly developed indicators for identifying them, differentiating the quality of wheat flour for the intended purpose, i.e. for finished products. To do this, we use mathematical statistics methods.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-420
Author(s):  
Amella Gusty ◽  
Dachriyanus Dachriyanus ◽  
Leni Merdawati

Kinerja perawat merupakan hasil yang dicapai dalam melaksanakan asuhan keperawatan di rumah sakit. Terciptanya asuhan keperawatan yang optimal sangat diperlukan dukungan dari pihak rumah sakit salah satunya adalah menciptakan kualitas kehidupan kerja baik bagi perawat. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui hubungan antara kualitas kehidupan kerja terhadap kinerja perawat pelaksana di RSUD Teluk Kuantan. Jenis penelitian kuantitatif dengan pendekatan cross sectional. Jumlah sampel 120 responden yang diperoleh melalui proportionate simple random sampling. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan kualitas kehidupan kerja perawat RSUD Teluk Kuantan berada pada kategori sedang, kinerja perawat berada pada kategori kurang baik. Berdasarkan analisis kedua variabel teridentifikasi bahwa tidak ada hubungan antara kualitas kehidupan kerja dengan kinerja perawat pelaksana dengan  p value 0,817. Dimensi work context merupakan komponen yang memiliki hubungan dengan kinerja perawat pelaksana dengan p value 0,008, dimensi work life  tidak berhubungan secara signifikan dengan kinerja perawat. Kesimpulan penelitian diketahui tidak ada hubungan antara kualitas kehidupan kerja dengan kinerja perawat pelaksana. Ada hubungan dimensi work context dengan kinerja perawat pelaksana. Tidak ada hubungan dimensi work life dengan kinerja perawat.   Kata kunci: kualitas kehidupan kerja, kinerja, perawat pelaksana   THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE QUALITY OF WORK LIFE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF IMPLEMENTERS NURSES   ABSTRACT Nurse performance is the result achieved in implementing nursing care in a hospital. The creation of optimal nursing care is very much needed support from the hospital, one of which is to create a good quality of work life for nurses. This study aims to determine the relationship between the quality of work life and the performance of nurses at the Kuantan District Hospital. This type of quantitative research with cross sectional approach. The number of samples of 120 respondents obtained through proportionate simple random sampling. The results showed that the quality of work life of nurses at the Kuantan District Hospital was in the medium category, the nurses' performance was in the unfavorable category. Based on the analysis of the two variables, it was identified that there was no relationship between the quality of work life with the performance of implementing nurses with a p value of 0.817. The work context dimension is a component that has a relationship with the performance of nurses implementing with p value 0.008, the dimension of work life does not significantly correlate with nurse performance. The conclusion of the research is that there is no relationship between the quality of work life and the performance of the implementing nurses. There is a relationship between the dimensions of the work context and the performance of the nurses. There is no relationship between the dimensions of work life and nurse performance.   Keywords: quality of work life, performance, implementers nurse


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
E. D. Solozhentsev

The scientific problem of economics “Managing the quality of human life” is formulated on the basis of artificial intelligence, algebra of logic and logical-probabilistic calculus. Managing the quality of human life is represented by managing the processes of his treatment, training and decision making. Events in these processes and the corresponding logical variables relate to the behavior of a person, other persons and infrastructure. The processes of the quality of human life are modeled, analyzed and managed with the participation of the person himself. Scenarios and structural, logical and probabilistic models of managing the quality of human life are given. Special software for quality management is described. The relationship of human quality of life and the digital economy is examined. We consider the role of public opinion in the management of the “bottom” based on the synthesis of many studies on the management of the economics and the state. The bottom management is also feedback from the top management.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (Number 2) ◽  
pp. 67-77
Author(s):  
Anis Syamimi Abd Rahim ◽  
Mohd Norhasni Mohd Asaad

The purpose of this study is to review the implementation of ISO 9001:2015 in order to improve the quality of services at Pusat Kesihatan Universiti (PKU), Universiti Utara Malaysia. The respondents of this study were customers at the PKU, UUM. The questionnaire was distributed to 50 respondents. The data were analyzed using SPSS software version 24. The data were tested using descriptive statistics, and correlation analysis to answer the research questions and to achieve the objectives. The findings show that customers agree that implementation of ISO 9001:2015 give service at PKU, UUM is good and satisfied. Through the correlation test, the results showed that the relationship between the implementation of ISO 9001:2015 has a positive and significant impact on customer satisfaction and the effect of implementing ISO 9001:2015 has a positive and significant impact in improving quality of service at PKU, UUM.Through mean and standard deviation tests, results show that tangible dimensions are the main dimensions of customer satisfaction while dimensions with low values are dimensions of responsiveness.Therefore, all aspects of service in PKU, UUM will be strengthened and all aspects of the weaknesses could be addressed to improve the service in order to maintain good quality services.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-41
Author(s):  
VLADIMIR NIKONOV ◽  
◽  
ANTON ZOBOV ◽  

The construction and selection of a suitable bijective function, that is, substitution, is now becoming an important applied task, particularly for building block encryption systems. Many articles have suggested using different approaches to determining the quality of substitution, but most of them are highly computationally complex. The solution of this problem will significantly expand the range of methods for constructing and analyzing scheme in information protection systems. The purpose of research is to find easily measurable characteristics of substitutions, allowing to evaluate their quality, and also measures of the proximity of a particular substitutions to a random one, or its distance from it. For this purpose, several characteristics were proposed in this work: difference and polynomial, and their mathematical expectation was found, as well as variance for the difference characteristic. This allows us to make a conclusion about its quality by comparing the result of calculating the characteristic for a particular substitution with the calculated mathematical expectation. From a computational point of view, the thesises of the article are of exceptional interest due to the simplicity of the algorithm for quantifying the quality of bijective function substitutions. By its nature, the operation of calculating the difference characteristic carries out a simple summation of integer terms in a fixed and small range. Such an operation, both in the modern and in the prospective element base, is embedded in the logic of a wide range of functional elements, especially when implementing computational actions in the optical range, or on other carriers related to the field of nanotechnology.


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