Making It For Real: Redesign of a Student Project in EDSGN 100 H
Principal Investigator: Dr. Charlotte de Vries, Mechanical Engineering
Co-principal investigator: Dr. Qi Dunsworth, Center for Teaching Initiatives
Collaborators (2017): Mr. Dean Lewis, Dr. John Roth, Mechanical Engineering
Collaborators (2018-19): Dr. David Beevers, Dr. Samaneh Fooladi, Dr. Yohannes Haile, Dr. Tom Hemminger, Mr. Peter Ingram, Ms. Jill Johnson, Mr. Brian Lani, Mr. Dean Lewis, Dr. Sudarshan Nelatury, Dr. John Roth.
Funded by: Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Penn State
Research questions:
1. Among the common instructional approaches, which approach helps engineering students learn the best?
2. How does a prototype-based project affect student learning compared to design-only projects?
Background:
Traditionally, students in EDSGN 100 learn about the engineering design process through design-only projects such as redesigning an electric toothbrush or selecting components for a renewable-engergy powered water well. Although these projects were hands-on, they did not include the part where students convert their design concepts into a tangible product. As a result, students would not have the opportunity to validate their conceptual design by building and testing a prototype in reality.
The Robot Car Project:
Supported by the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, a pilot student project was introduced to the honors sections in fall 2017. Students were asked to use the programmable Arduino kit to build a line-following robot car. They were given the freedom to design their own chassis that holds the wires and circuit board inside, as long as the final prototype operated within the functional parameters. In designing the robot car, students were asked to sketch design concepts, select the best one and use low-fidelity materials to create beta prototypes that allowed them to calibrate the sensors and update the robotic code. Once they had a working chassis, students created it in Autodesk Inventor and realized the final design of the chassis through 3D printing and laser cutting.
To measure if the “design-build-test” project has an impact on student learning, students were asked to report their preferred method of learning and how they relate engineering design to real life before and after the project. We found that at the completion of the robot car project, students became less in favor of lecture-based instructions. Rather, they have developed a preference for figuring out the solutions on their own. Students highly appreciated the open-ended nature of this design project and the hands-on experience.
The project was revised for the second and third pilot phases in the summer and fall of 2018 and was extended to all EDSGN 100 sections starting in spring 2019. You can see a collection of student projects from 2017 to 2019.
Publications and Presentations:
de Vries, C., & Dunsworth, Q. (2018, October). Making it for real: Redesign of a First-Year Engineering Project. In 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) (pp. 1-5). IEEE.
de Vries, C., Lewis, D. Q., & Dunsworth, Q. (2019, July). Prototyping a prototype-based project with minimal equipment requirements. In 2019 FYEE Conference.
Related: Penn State Behrend News
