2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Presenting a system/project design to a wide variety of audience is an essential aspect of every project and helps engineers think about their system design from many different perspectives. These perspectives can give rise to several design explorations and ideas to solve the problem. However, describing a system simply but comprehensively does not come naturally to students. It is also one of those coveted intangible engineering skills that students misconstrue as pure presentation skills. This paper describes a systematic approach used to teach student teams in Electrical and Computer Engineering Senior Design at North Carolina State University to describe a high-level system design comprehensively. The paper describes a teaching method that breaks down the system into three understandable and separate parts. Each of these parts has been designed with a specific purpose related to the system, and it looks at the system from a unique perspective. When put together, these three parts work hand in hand to describe the system completely. These parts of the same system also make it easy for students to divide their thought processes into separate perspectives. These parts are (i) Project Concept Diagram/s, (ii) User Operational Flowcharts, and (iii) Functional Block Diagrams. Literature suggests that these charts/diagrams have a unique place in the System Engineering approach. However, in this paper, a table is created with purpose, needed perspective, elements, format, and examples for each part. Authors also point out connections between these three charts and how to create them to work hand in hand to describe the complete system. Such information, when presented to student teams, not only helps them describe their system fully but also helps them understand several requirements and constraints of the system easily and objectively, irrespective of the problem at hand. The paper presents preliminary observations and comparisons on the quality of system description from various design teams to assess the method. It has been observed that such a system description encourages design divergence, which helps design choices be more fitting. This is a work in progress.