2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering design is a critical learning outcome for a mechanical engineering curriculum. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) requires that Mechanical Engineering programs demonstrate that graduating students have “an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors.” (ABET Criterion 3) Design has also been identified as a curricular pillar for modern engineering programs in recent reports such as in the MIT Engineering Department initiative on New Engineering Education Transformation report. (Graham, 2016)
XXXXXXX University recently created a new mechanical engineering program which has recently received full ABET accreditation. The original program structure followed a very traditional curricular model with limited input from faculty members, as the bulk of the faculty members had not yet been hired at the time the program curriculum was initially developed. As new faculty have been hired and begun teaching in the program, their knowledge, and experiences at past institutions as well as a desire to improve on the traditional curriculum model has motivated the need to make curricular improvements to the program. Specifically, there is an interest to improve how design is taught throughout the curriculum of the 4-year mechanical engineering program.
This study is a continuation of a previous work-in-progress submission. The purpose of this study is 1) to evaluate the effectiveness of the current curriculum of a Mechanical Engineering program in helping students to learn and apply the design process and 2) to investigate and propose a curricular strategy for improving design instruction across the curriculum. A refined survey of current students in all four years of the program is presented and discussed to assess the current state of design instruction and its effectiveness in student comprehension of the design process. Additionally, a survey of faculty is included to better understand how design is incorporated into the current curriculum. Based on the survey assessments, a model for how to include and better reinforce the design process across the curriculum is proposed. This model will be implemented and evaluated in future works.