2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Prototyping is a central element of the design process, enabling low-stakes, iterative exploration of ideas. However, for many students, the purposes and expectations of prototypes remain ambiguous, limiting their ability to begin prototyping effectively or to evolve prototypes toward functional solutions. This lack of understanding can limit students’ ability to gain momentum in starting to prototype or in effectively transitioning between prototype evolutions. While prototyping is an important skill for students to learn, it is just as important for faculty to be able to provide structured feedback to support student prototyping evolution from rudimentary ideas to functional solutions that achieve design goals. Many tools exist to support students starting to prototype (for example, the 30 min. prototype, the prototyping canvas, low fidelity prototyping), but few tools exist to support novice design educators to score these prototypes and provide student feedback that succinctly describes how to evolve the features and functions of this prototype.

This paper presents a redesigned prototype evaluation rubric developed to align student and instructor expectations during formal design reviews. The rubric builds on an existing tool used over fifteen years in a first-year, project-based engineering design course. The original rubric has been used effectively to provide a framework for a structured conversation in formal design reviews; teams showcase their prototypes and describe their process towards achieving design outcomes. The instructors previously found that the original rubric served as a worthwhile tool that allowed student teams to reflect on their progress, and was flexible for use with a variety of types of design projects. The tradeoff for this flexibility was that the open-ended nature made it hard to use effectively because it lacked instructions. Furthermore, it was not a valuable tool for novice designers unfamiliar with the structure of design reviews.

The success of the original rubric and its open-ended nature led the authors to consider how this rubric could be redeveloped for use by any instructor in a design course to conduct a formal design review. Thus, we sought to redesign the rubric to help students self-assess their work and clearly understand how to improve their prototypes to meet design goals. Our own redesign goals for the rubric were to help instructors to communicate expectations clearly and to assess student prototypes in a consistent and predictable way. In our paper, we will present the redesigned rubric as well as some test-cases illustrating how it should be used and the impact of implementation.