2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the last few years, our interdisciplinary research team (blinded for review) has focused on designing and implementing human-centered engineering design (HCED) content within select, required aerospace courses. We aim to support students in building and reinforcing their content knowledge by providing them consistent opportunities to recall and apply lecture topics in collaborative projects and lab assignments. In previous work, we described our overarching goal to develop learning progressions across these courses and implement content in a way that strengthens cohesive connections among the courses. We also developed and implemented our design-for-requirements in-class project, which has been iterated following student and researcher feedback and is now in its fifth variation.

In this paper, we discuss, from an instructor’s perspective, our efforts and motivations regarding the design and implementation of the project and how it fits into the bigger picture of our team’s efforts. For the project, teams of three students each are tasked with constructing gliders by hand using only the low-fidelity materials provided in class. Glider-Catapult projects are required to: incur minimum cost, maintain safety for the pilot (i.e., stakeholder), fly long range, fly straight, and demonstrate precision and moderate endurance. The project’s objective is for students to iterate on their glider designs to improve the designs’ ability to meet these requirements. Students are evaluated on their ability to connect the project to aerodynamics- and flight mechanics-related class content. Each team is expected to create value by developing a system for a class-wide final design competition, as scored during their end-of-project competition by Equation 1.

{(Range [ft] - Deviation from Center [ft])/(Total Project Cost [$])}*(Precision Percentage) Eq. 1

In this paper, we will discuss the team formation strategies, ethics, stakeholder focus, iterative design, and experimentation incorporated in the project. We will also elaborate on teams’ participation in the competition, which supports communal engagement and is used to help prepare students for sharing work in public. We will use pre-/post-test surveys, given at the beginning and end of the semester, along with students’ written reflections, to inspect students’ HCED competency development. As a consequence of this in-class project’s deployment and success, the pilot stakeholder element is now being scaled across our course sequence. These efforts are significant for demonstrating how the HCED framework is integrated in a hand-on project for Aerospace second-year students. The pilot stakeholder is used to promote design-thinking around safety and ethics, allowing students to iterate on vehicle design through experimentation while considering stakeholder needs.