ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION AND TRAINING WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO BRIDGE DESIGN

Author(s):  
Ayman Y. Nassif

This paper presents a case study of an undergraduate integrated civil engineering design project module. This module involved significant input from practicing structural engineers, civil engineers, and architects, leading to a holistic course of study taking into consideration technical, social, economic, and environmental issues. The teaching philosophy focused on engagement and motivation that concentrated on a) incorporating behavioral affective and cognitive dimensions, and b) providing appropriate support at the right time for maximum impact on learning. Educational theories related to acquiring skills, construction of knowledge based on cognitive apprenticeship, knowledge-scaffolding, and constructive alignment were explored and used in the design of the module. The assessment ensured engagement and motivation with clear support for just-in-time continuous formative assessment. Learning-diaries and minutes of design meetings were introduced as a tool contributing to knowledge-scaffolding. This paper presents a methodology of how the educational theories can be applied pragmatically for more effective education and training of engineers.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Sauder ◽  
Yan Jin

Students are frequently trained in a variety of methodologies to promote their creativity in the collaborative environment. Some of the training and methods work well, while others present challenges. A collaborative stimulation approach is taken to extend creative cognition to collaborative creativity, providing new insights into design methodologies and training. An experiment using retrospective protocol analysis, originally conducted to identify the various types of collaborative stimulation, revealed how diversity of past creative experiences correlates with collaborative stimulation. This finding aligns with previous research. Unfortunately, many current engineering design education programs do not adequately provide opportunities for diverse creative experiences. As this study and other research has found, there is a need to create courses in engineering design programs which encourage participation in diverse creative activities.


Author(s):  
Brian Burns

The Case Study has become a pedagogical vehicle ofchoice in helping engineering students to gain perspective on the multidisciplinary realities of design. What once were termed ‘war stories’ have evolved to a level where case studies are available and downloadable on all manner of topics. For the fundamental knowledge-based issues of engineering, example questions have commonly been created to help the student manoeuvre through all manner of possible combinations of application. The case study is not however fabricated, and relies on the reporting and documentation of a real design or engineering product development. In recent years many of these case studies have been related to ethics and communication, but very few have been related to ongoing product development and issues of Industrial Design. This is not surprising since the creation of such case studies is time consuming, and design is often a ‘messy’ process in which few companies would be keen to expose their failures along the way. Nevertheless case studies are a vital part of Engineering Design education and offer excellent potential for the development of the pedagogy vital to the dynamic formulation of Engineering Design Education. This paper references three design projects undertaken professionally by the author as an Industrial Designer working with predominantly engineering based companies. The aim is to identify critical aspects of these projects that could be used as lessons, perhaps, but not necessarily, as case studies, but to be incorporated into engineering design education.


Author(s):  
Arti Awasthi

India has gradually evolved as knowledge based economy due to the abundance of capable, flexible and qualified human capital. With the constantly rising influence of globalization, India has immense opportunities to establish its distinctive position in the world. However, there is a need to further develop and empower the human capital to ensure the nations global competitiveness. Despite the empathetic stress laid on education and training in this country, there is still a shortage of skilled manpower to address the mounting needs and demands of the economy. Skill building can be viewed as an instrument to improve the effectiveness and contribution of labor to the overall production. It is as an important ingredient to push the production possibility frontier outward and to take growth rate of the economy to a higher trajectory. This paper focuses on skill development in Small and Medium Enterprise (SMEs) which contribute nearly 8 percent of the country's GDP, 45 percent of the manufacturing output and 40 percent of the exports. They provide the largest share of employment after agriculture. They are the nurseries for entrepreneurship and innovation. SMEs have been established in almost all-major sectors in the Indian industry. The main assets for any firm, especially small and medium sized enterprises are their human capital. This is even more important in the knowledge based economy, where intangible factors and services are of growing importance. The rapid obsolescence of knowledge is a key factor of the knowledge economy. However, we also know that for a small business it is very difficult to engage staff in education and training in order to update and upgrade their skills within continuous learning approach. Therefore there is a need to innovate new techniques and strategies of skill development to develop human capital in SME's.


Author(s):  
Warren F. Smith

The “Warman Design and Build Competition”, running across Australasian Universities, is now in its 26th year in 2013. Presented in this paper is a brief history of the competition, documenting the objectives, yearly scenarios, key contributors and champion Universities since its beginning in 1988. Assuming the competition has reached the majority of mechanical and related discipline engineering students in that time, it is fair to say that this competition, as a vehicle of the National Committee on Engineering Design, has served to shape Australasian engineering education in an enduring way. The philosophy of the Warman Design and Build Competition and some of the challenges of running it are described in this perspective by its coordinator since 2003. In particular, the need is for the competition to work effectively across a wide range of student group ability. Not every group engaging with the competition will be competitive nationally, yet all should learn positively from the experience. Reported also in this paper is the collective feedback from the campus organizers in respect to their use of the competition as an educational experience in their classrooms. Each University participating uses the competition differently with respect to student assessment and the support students receive. However, all academic campus organizer responses suggest that the competition supports their own and their institutional learning objectives very well. While the project scenarios have varied widely over the years, the intent to challenge 2nd year university (predominantly mechanical) engineering students with an open-ended statement of requirements in a practical and experiential exercise has been a constant. Students are faced with understanding their opportunity and their client’s value system as expressed in a scoring algorithm. They are required to conceive, construct and demonstrate their device with limited prior knowledge and experience, and the learning outcomes clearly impact their appreciation for teamwork, leadership and product realization.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elise Belanger ◽  
Caroline Bartels ◽  
Jinjuan She

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic forced college education to shift from face-to-face to online instruction. This effort is particularly challenging for freshmen and sophomore students, in engineering design projects where collaborations are needed. The study aims to qualitatively understand challenges and possible strategies revealed by students in remote design collaboration through the lens of an undergraduate-level engineering design introduction class. The authors closely observed team members’ struggles and how they handled them through bi-weekly and final reflections in a semester-long project. The challenges and strategies from 11 teams (42 students) were analyzed and implications for future engineering design education were discussed. The findings provide insights to experimentations that aim to establish a successful remote learning environment that reaches core education objectives of engineering design while also helping students adapt to a geographically distributed engineering workforce in future. The study also illustrated the usefulness of reflections as a tool to capture students’ learning dynamics.


Author(s):  
S. Li ◽  
C. Chua

Mental simulation represents how a person interprets and understands the causal relations associated with the perceived information, and it is considered an important cognitive device to support engineering design activities. Mental models are considered information characterized in a person’s mind to understand the external world. They are important components to support effective mental simulation. This paper begins with a discussion on the experiential learning approach and how it supports learners in developing mental models for design activities. Following that, the paper looks at the four types of mental models: object, making, analysis and project, and illustrates how they capture different aspects and skills of design activities. Finally, the paper proposes an alternative framework, i.e., Spiral Learning Approach, which is an integration of Kolb’s experiential learningcycle and the Imaginative Education (IE) framework. While the Kolb’s cycle informs a pattern to leverage personal experiences to reusable knowledge, the IE’s framework suggests how prior experiences can trigger imagination and advance understandings. A hypothetical design of a snow removal device is used to illustrate the ideas of design-related mental models and the spirallearning approach.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document