2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Aerospace structures courses often appear in the third year of aerospace engineering programs, and are a cornerstone course providing required technical content for the fourth year capstone design course. As cornerstones, these courses should also help develop engineering students’ understanding of design and professional skills. A novel approach taken at Red University involves collaborating with over a dozen aviation museums across the United States and Canada to implement authentic assessments. The collaboration was created in 2020 in response to COVID-driven online learning, and has continued to the present, impacting over 150 students in Red University’s aerospace engineering program.
Each museum selects an aircraft from their collection for a team of four to five students to
examine. The students interact with the curatorial, restoration, and archive staff at the museum via email and Zoom calls to retrieve the necessary technical data to complete analyses ranging from beam bending and web-stringer to plates and shells. Further, each aircraft has an associated pilot or engineer that the students must study to determine the use case of the aircraft that drives their subsequent structural analyses. For the museums, the teams produce non-technical abstracts and CAD models that supplement the museums’ displays.
By design, this course project is open-ended and requires the students to make a series of
assumptions, depending on the data available, to complete their technical analyses. Further, the students must deliver their analyses through technical memoranda, reports, and presentations. This course structure follows the Wiggins framework for authentic assessments.
The objectives of the present work-in-progress study are to assess the impact that interacting with museums has on the technical and professional development of the students. Two cohorts of students are studied, the first cohort is currently (2022-2023 academic year) taking the aerospace structures courses at Red University, while the second cohort took the courses during the 2021-2022 academic year. Two cohorts are studied to assess the short term and longer-term development of the students. The research questions considered are
1. What are the students’ initial responses to encountering an open-ended analysis project?
2. Do the students’ technical skills develop linearly during the courses or is the development
recursive?
3. How do students’ conceptualizations of an open-ended problem develop throughout the
project?
4. Does an open-ended project in a cornerstone course provide improved preparation for
senior capstone?
These research questions are assessed via a sequence of surveys and interviews of students from both cohorts.