Defining Function: How Student Definitions Compare to Literature and Function Model Generation

The concept of “function” serves various purposes in engineering design, resulting in a variety of definitions for the same term. This paper presents an analysis of function definitions provided by mechanical engineering students as part of a larger protocol study on function modeling behaviors. This work investigates the relationships between student definitions of function and their corresponding completed function models. Student definitions are also compared to those found in literature using a topical analysis. Student definitions tend to skew towards one topic, whereas definitions in literature are found to be more likely to contain a combination of topics. Subsequently, student definitions are compared to the function models generated by students based on the size and completeness evaluation of models. Larger function models are found to be correlated to definitions that include terms such as “input/output” and “process”. Definitions that use terms such as “task” and “action” are found to have higher evaluation scores, but the differences are small in magnitude. In general, the activity of creating a function model was found to influence how students define function. Finally, limitations of the work are discussed along with future research directions.