2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Understanding and using the engineering design process is a core aspect of any undergraduate engineering program. Typically, incorporation of the engineering design process begins early in the engineering program and is showcased in a culminating experience or capstone. This Work in Progress paper preliminary insights into curricular practices for two courses in a civil engineering degree. The first course is a second-year seminar lab that was recently structured to integrate engineering design into activities that were traditionally non-design in nature. The engineering design process is woven throughout the course in three labs featuring different civil engineering disciplines and a semester-long design project. Through scaffolding and repetition, students work through problem definition, criteria development and forming an evaluation matrix multiple times over the course of the semester. The second course is a capstone design course that is taken in the final semester. Students complete a project based on a real-world problem and are guided by the instructor and external mentors.
We assessed students’ abilities to apply the engineering design process in both classes. In the second-year seminar lab, we look at students’ success over time with writing problem descriptions and needs statements, generating criteria, and recognizing constraints. Through repeated practice, students’ abilities increased, which was partly measured by the number of attempts required to achieve specifications set by the instructor. Student self-reported confidence with engineering design before and after the lab course is also presented. Similarly, we assessed students’ abilities to apply the engineering design process in the capstone design course, and we compared results across two groups: those who had taken the second-year seminar lab and those who had not. The results are expected to inform department practice on the effectiveness of repeated practice in developing and retaining engineering design skills.