2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

BYOE: Troubleshooting is a vital problem-solving skill for practicing engineers, so it is imperative that engineering students learn how to troubleshoot effectively. However, troubleshooting is rarely explicitly taught to engineering students, and traditional undergraduate engineering classes and laboratories seldom provide students with dedicated opportunities to practice doing troubleshooting. There is a need to develop tailored problems and exercises that can be used to teach students how to troubleshoot and allow them to intentionally practice and develop their troubleshooting skills.

To address this need, we created a circuit troubleshooting problem that is meant to be used as a laboratory experiment in an undergraduate electrical engineering class. This paper presents the design rationale behind that problem through the theoretical lenses of complexity, ill-structuredness, knowledge type application, and the troubleshooting process. We explain how we designed this problem to leverage complexity and ill-structuredness in very intentional ways, and we walk through the process of solving this problem using the expert troubleshooting process. We also explain the unique ways in which different knowledge types (conceptual, structural, procedural, domain/experiential, and strategic) are necessary to apply during that process to make progress towards a solution to the problem.

This problem serves as an example of a troubleshooting problem that electronics instructors can integrate into their existing circuits classes as a laboratory experiment. It can be used to explicitly teach students troubleshooting strategies and procedures. Besides this, we also argue that troubleshooting problems in general can be a particularly effective pedagogical tool for students to learn specific technical concepts and skills, because they provide a meaningful context for students to understand when and how to apply them. We offer some concluding remarks for engineering instructors regarding how they could design their own troubleshooting problems by purposefully manipulating the same theoretical aspects we used to create ours. We propose using these theoretical dimensions to reflect on the design of class exercises (troubleshooting or otherwise) because they can be calibrated in different ways to intentionally require students to critically think about, and judiciously apply, desired concepts, skills, tools, and procedures.