The ASME Student Design Contest as a Transitional Design Experience

Author(s):  
Robert Choate ◽  
Kevin Schmaltz

Teams of Mechanical Engineering students at Western Kentucky University (WKU) participate in the ASME Student Design Contest (SDC) as a component of a Junior Design course. The required course activities include a design review, a mock contest at WKU, and project documentation. Students are also given the option of attending the Regional Conference SDC. Over the past two years, every team has participated at the Regional SDC, with 19 of 27 students attending. Both the 2004 and 2005 WKU teams won the regional competition. The Junior Design course uses the SDC as an intermediate component of a Professional Plan developed and implemented by the WKU ME faculty to assure that program graduates have experienced key areas of the engineering profession and demonstrated the ability to perform in a professional manner. The Professional Component consists of Engineering Design, Professional Communications, Professional Tools, and Ethics. Students receive instruction and practice in all four areas at least once per academic year. With the Engineering Design sequence, freshmen individually build an artifact, sophomores function in design teams, and juniors extend the design experience to an external audience. Technical rigor and faculty expectations obviously rise at each level. The goal is for seniors to be prepared to implement an industry-based project subject to realistic constraints and customer needs. As one of the two design projects in the Junior Design course, the SDC provides a structured design experience with an external flavor. Student teams must demonstrate both problem solving under constraints as well as creativity. To reinforce the economic aspects of design, teams are given a budget, and must fund over expenditures themselves. In addition to the design component of the SDC, the project also includes Professional Communications in the form of design reviews and design notebooks, and Professional Tools such as software for communication, CAD and analytical calculations. The 2005 class has been effective producing rapid prototype components of their designs from CAD models. The Junior Design implementation of the SDC has evolved over the past three years guided by ongoing assessment of both the course and the Professional Component program outcomes. The milestones and associated requirements in the ASME SDC project provides a definitive set of deliverables throughout the progression of the semester long experience. Individual and team performance can be monitored and evaluated with timely feedback, and course outcomes map well into program level assessment. This is a strength of the Professional Component framework that allows for building upon previous coursework, assessing student progress, and adjusting course coverage based on prior assessments to assure that graduating ME students are capable of practicing as engineers.

Author(s):  
Rober Choate ◽  
Kevin Schmaltz

Mechanical Engineering students at Western Kentucky University (WKU) are given instruction and must demonstrate their abilities to execute design projects during each of their four years of study. The features and goals of these projects are governed by a Professional Plan, which assures that graduates of the program have experienced key areas of the engineering profession and shown the ability to perform in an acceptable professional manner. The Engineering Design component of the Professional Plan is the focal point of the professional experiences. For students to be able to execute a structured approach to solving problems with an appreciation for the art of engineering, they must experience meaningful projects that expand and challenge their capabilities. WKU ME freshmen individually create physical devices with little engineering science, developing a sense of the manufacturing skills required for realistic designs. Sophomore students execute a team design project with more technical expectations, and also individually complete a design and build project that continues from their freshman project. As juniors, the team design experience is extended to an external audience with greater technical rigor, and additionally student teams implement the ASME Student Design Competition (ASME SDC) as their design and build project. The goal is for seniors to be prepared to implement an industry-based design and build project subject to realistic constraints and customer needs. The implementation of the Engineering Design Component has evolved over the past four years guided by ongoing assessment of both course outcomes and program outcomes, internal and external evaluations of the design project outcomes, and the maturing status of the program facilities and curriculum. One strength of the Professional Plan framework is the ability to build upon previous coursework, assess student progress, and adjust course activities based on prior assessment results to assure that graduates are capable of practicing as engineers. This paper will detail a sustainable model for implementing the design process across the curriculum, with the basis for selecting projects, managing the efforts of student teams, and providing effective feedback. In addition to the engineering design component, the use of professional communications and professional tools are also structured within the design projects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Muhibul Haque Bhuyan ◽  
Azwad Tamir

It is an important and challenging task to develop concepts and skills of undergraduate engineering students in computer programming course and hence their evaluation on higher order skills. Already several methods are developed to evaluate the students of this course for various engineering programs, but a method for undergraduate electrical and electronic engineering (EEE) program was not found in the literature. In this paper, a simple evaluation method for the students of computer programming course of undergraduate EEE (BSc in EEE) program has been reported using result-oriented learning. Detail methodology, course syllabus design, course outcomes (COs) and mapping it with program outcomes (POs) of BSc in EEE, question setting following Bloom’s taxonomy, laboratory experiment, assessment plan, course and PO evaluation data and graphs have been presented along with relevant statistics. All data are presented for a cohort of students who took this course in summer 2019 Semester at EEE Department of Southeast University. It has been observed that the target set by the course teacher has been achieved by the students. Recommendations of the course teacher for further improvement of the COs’ achievement have also been presented. Keywords: CO evaluation, programming course, OBE


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farah Jibril ◽  
Bassnt Yasser ◽  
Mahmoud Abdulwahed ◽  
Mazen Hasna ◽  
Mohieddine Benammar ◽  
...  

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth David ◽  
John R. Lloyd

Abstract Globalization of engineering design teams occurs both in industry and also in the engineering classroom. Strategic needs for operating multi-site operations and inter-organizational alliances call for more effective boundary-spanning partnerships: inter-divisional, inter-organizational, and often, multi-country partnerships. This paper reports a multi-discipline research study — involving engineering, anthropology and telecommunications elements — on global engineering design teams. US engineering students from mechanical, chemical, and electrical engineering worked together with counterparts from China and the Netherlands. The students learned advanced telecommunication media and transcultural communication skills needed to carry out the tri-continental design project. They used an active learning process called transcultural incident reporting that focuses on cultural and power issues that must be managed in order to accomplish high quality design. The engineers’ reports show a gain in understanding of the cultural and power issues that affect boundary-spanning project performance.


Author(s):  
Alexander J. Carroll ◽  
Shelby J. Hallman ◽  
Kelly A. Umstead ◽  
James McCall ◽  
Andrew J. DiMeo

Objective: Entrepreneurship and innovative product design in health care requires expertise in finding and evaluating diverse types of information from a multitude of sources to accomplish a number of tasks, such as securing regulatory approval, developing a reimbursement strategy, and navigating intellectual property. The authors sought to determine whether an intensive, specialized information literacy training program that introduced undergraduate biomedical engineering students to these concepts would improve the quality of the students’ design projects. We also sought to test whether information literacy training that included active learning exercises would offer increased benefits over training delivered via lectures and if this specialized information literacy training would increase the extent of students’ information use.Methods: A three-arm cohort study was conducted with a control group and two experimental groups. Mixed methods assessment, including a rubric and citation analysis, was used to evaluate program outcomes by examining authentic artifacts of student learning.Results: Student design teams that received information literacy training on topics related to medical entrepreneurship and health care economics showed significantly improved performance on aspects of project performance relevant to health care economics over student design teams that did not receive this training. There were no significant differences between teams that engaged in active learning exercises and those that only received training via lectures. Also, there were no significant differences in citation patterns between student teams that did or did not receive specialized information literacy training.Conclusions: Information literacy training can be used as a method for introducing undergraduate health sciences students to the health care economics aspects of the medical entrepreneurship life cycle, including the US Food and Drug Administration regulatory environment, intellectual property, and medical billing and reimbursement structures.


Author(s):  
Robert L Nagel ◽  
Kyle G Gipson ◽  
Jacquelyn K Nagel ◽  
Thomas Moran

Cornerstone design at James Madison University is a two-semester, client-based service learning project. Each year, sophomore engineering students work to design human-powered vehicles for a community member with needs very different from their own as a result of cerebral palsy. This paper provides a reflection of the fifth iteration (2013-2014) of this year-long sophomore design experience with the overarching goal to provide a transferable model such that other engineering programs may learn from our lessons and develop their own service learning experience. The reflection contained in this paper was catalyzed through participation in the National Science Foundation-funded Integrating Design and Community Engagement within the Curriculum Workshop hosted at Purdue University from June 19-20, 2014. In addition to reflection on the course, the paper provides insight into course coordination and assessment, and lessons learned over the past five years.


Author(s):  
Patricia Kristine Sheridan ◽  
Jason A Foster ◽  
Geoffrey S Frost

All Engineering Science students at the University of Toronto take the cornerstone Praxis Sequence of engineering design courses. In the first course in the sequence, Praxis I, students practice three types of engineering design across three distinct design projects. Previously the final design project had the students first frame and then develop conceptual design solutions for a self-identified challenge. While this project succeeded in providing an appropriate foundational design experience, it failed to fully prepare students for the more complex design experience in Praxis II. The project also failed to ingrain the need for clear and concise engineering communication, and the students’ lack of understanding of detail design inhibited their ability to make practical and realistic design decisions. A revised Product Design project in Praxis I was designed with the primary aims of: (a) pushing students beyond the conceptual design phase of the design process, and (b) simulating a real-world work environment by: (i) increasing the interdependence between student teams and (ii) increasing the students’ perceived value of engineering communication.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document