2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Theory-based and Evidence-based Practice paper extends the frameworks of PBL as project-based learning to describe a concept of “product”-based learning – learning experiences that focus on the deliberate design and making of tangible products with some engineering complexity as the learning goal of a course. Professional preparation of engineers, as with the law, and medicine, necessitates the application of knowledge through an applied rehearsal in authentic learning situations. The clinic of law or medicine is sometimes practiced as a capstone educational experience in fields of engineering.

Having engineering students work together on a project is becoming a prominent pedagogical approach in upper-level engineering undergraduate courses and graduate courses. This directly supports the professional practice and professional formation for many fields of engineering and addresses many ABET student learning outcomes. Additionally, greater availability of rapid prototyping and maker spaces can support these types of learning experiences, allowing student teams more access to holistically imagine, design, and more readily build their solutions. The more authentically these learning experiences can be curated and staged by instructors, the more meaningful and useful such courses can be for our students as future engineers.

A multiple case-study approach is used to apply and illustrate a “product”-based learning framework to multiple courses: a global design innovation course, a mechatronic (smart products) design course, a designing for the developing world design course, and a measure of comparison, a statics course.. We also develop and describe three dimensions for considering the pedagogical intent of such courses along axes of people-focused, product-focused, and process-focused.

By identifying and describing aspects relevant to the deployment of a product-based learning approach, crossed with considerations of developing the people, product, and process of the learning intent and concentration of appropriate activities can be helpful to better place classes across a learning spectrum as well, making better informed educational experiences. It can also be of use to be able to start to understand how contextual and pedagogical approaches can be applicable across the extent of a number of considerations such as balancing breadth and depth, abstract and concrete concepts, and engineering science and engineering design.