2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In 2023, significant changes were implemented in the first-year engineering program at the University of Virginia leading to a major redesign of courses across the curriculum. Previously, first-year students took two separate courses: one focused on the engineering design process, technical communication, and prototyping, while the other centered on sociotechnical concepts, non-technical communication, and ethics. However, starting in 2024, these courses were integrated into a single sequence taught by one instructor to eliminate artificial distinctions between technical and sociotechnical topics.

This curricular shift had ripple effects. Some technical content previously covered in a second-year biomedical engineering (BME) design course was moved to the first year. Consequently, the BME design course had to be restructured for the 2024-25 academic year. Key changes include the addition of a second major design project, elevated CAD training, and adjustments in hands-on fabrication.

We hypothesized that introducing two intensive design projects in the second year would result in greater gains in engineering design process knowledge compared to previous iterations of the course, which included only one project. We further hypothesized that the first-year design course would cause an increase in engineering design process knowledge at the beginning of the second-year class compared to the previous curriculum. To test these hypotheses, we are administering an engineering design process knowledge instrument {Bailey and Szabo, 2005} at both the beginning and end of the second-year design course. Our data suggest that while the second-year design course revision caused a signficant increase in engineering design process knowledge, at least in the short term, there were no durable changes in design process knowledge stemming from the first-year course.