2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

During summer of 2023, two capstone instructors in mechanical engineering at X university set about redesigning the capstone course to offer students an experience that would expose them to the world of product design and development, and infuse a design mindset to their engineering activities.

To redesign the course, the instructors participated in a “course design institute” through X University’s Teaching Center in May of 2023. The month-long program let the instructors through the Backward Design Process (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005). This process allows instructors to first identify desired student outcomes and then design the course around those desired results. It should be noted that this bears a striking resemblance to user-centered design, a core tenet of this capstone course, in which designers strive to first understand their stakeholders before designing a solution.

Employing the backward design process, the instructors first developed broad learning goals for the capstone course, which described what students would know how to do and what they would care about upon completing the two-semester capstone sequence. Next the instructors identified learning outcomes, which describe what the students would be expected to know or formally do, before moving on to identify assessment techniques and filling in the content of the course.

Key aspects of the design mindset which were infused in this new course included: being inquisitive and open, being empathetic to others’ needs, being accepting of ambiguity, questioning critically, and a proclivity to taking purposeful action (Schweitzer, et al 2016).

The two instructors involved in this redesign both have experience in the world of product design and development, and aimed to structure the course and project path to reflect many of the practices that designers and engineers might employ in the product development industry. Key practices that the instructors wanted to emphasize in the course included: research skills to gain understanding of stakeholders, contexts, and constraints relevant to a problem; a focus on problem finding & framing, rather than jumping right into a solution; developing divergent thinking to facilitate fluent and fruitful concept brainstorming; building communication skills beyond technical writing, to include visual communication and the importance of storytelling.

This paper will share a review of literature relevant to factors surrounding a design mindset and how a design mindset can impact design practice in the world of product development. Additionally, this paper will share benchmarking of best practices from the product design and development industry.

This paper will discuss the implementation of this new capstone course during the 23-24 academic year. Discussion will include:
- Summary of student outcomes
- Instructor reflection on implementation
- Comparison of standard course evaluations from the first course in the sequence (comparing previous iterations of the course vs. current iteration)
- Reflection from students on their experience with specific learning outcomes
- Reflection from students on the value and utility of certain exercises and skills