2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering design fosters students' capacity to apply technical knowledge towards innovative solutions. While design has gained visibility in engineering education through programs like entrepreneurship, freshman design, and senior capstone projects, there's a demand to integrate design across students' academic journey. The technical intensity of engineering curricula poses challenges in dedicating courses exclusively to design thinking or applying the design process. An alternative approach is to reimagine laboratory courses by incorporating engineering design.
This pilot study explored the integration of engineering design principles in a required 14-week 'engineering analysis and design' laboratory course for second-year mechanical engineering students. The course combines lectures with hands-on laboratory sessions, covering topics such as gears, motors, dynamics, hydraulics, and engines. The course also introduces Ulrich and Eppinger's engineering design process and the ABET definition of engineering design to students, emphasizing open-ended problem-solving. The laboratory curriculum included two dissection labs, three Design-Build-Test (DBT) labs and a semester-long BeetleBot project, to provide practical exposure to mechanical engineering concepts. We sought to understand how engineering students drew connections between the lab content and engineering design, for the purpose of potentially updating the lab content. The course was assessed in Fall 2022 at the end of the semester through a voluntary, anonymous Google form survey that included questions about student impressions of the lab course. The survey recorded which labs were perceived by students as being most integrated with engineering design and which key aspects of engineering design (derived from the ABET definition) students felt were present in each lab. Results (n = 13) indicated that students perceived the BeetleBot project and DBT labs as the most integrated with engineering design, with the BeetleBot project being particularly well-regarded. Results suggested that engineering educators can leverage short-term DBT labs strategically to introduce design elements without the resource-intensive nature of semester-long projects. Despite the strengths, students felt that DBT labs lacked realistic constraints, suggesting an opportunity for improvement. Dissection labs received mixed feedback, indicating a need for intentional scaffolding to emphasize design aspects like creativity and iteration. Overall, the findings provide a foundation for future iterations and improvements as well as strategies for engineering educators seeking to enhance design integration in engineering laboratory courses.