2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
GIFTS: Recreate: Experientially Motivating Professional Standards in Engineering Documentation
Presented at FPD: GIFTS Papers - Approaches to Holistic Student Development and Support
Engineering documentation is a critical professional skill, yet undergraduate students often perceive it as a low-value, product-oriented task rather than an integral part of the design process. This disconnect contributes to a preparedness gap between academic training and industry expectations, where clear and reproducible records are essential. Here, we introduce Recreate, a two-stage classroom activity that shifts student perceptions of documentation through productive failure and leads them toward identifying professional documentation standards.
In Stage 1, students attempt to replicate an artifact using intentionally flawed documentation, leading to failure and exposing limitations in their existing practices. Through guided reflection, students identify these shortcomings and develop criteria for high-quality documentation. In Stage 2, they receive documentation where these criteria are applied, leading to the successful completion of a similar task due to this improved documentation.
The activity was implemented in early engineering design courses and assessed using a mixed-methods, pre-post design. Results show a modest increase in students’ perceived utility of engineering notebooks and a clear shift toward audience-aware, process-oriented documentation practices emphasizing clarity and reproducibility. These findings suggest that Recreate is an effective and scalable approach for introducing professional documentation standards in early engineering education.
-
Kevin William Bachelor University California, Santa Cruz [biography]
-
Dr. Tela Favaloro University of California, Santa Cruz [biography]
Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.