Richard W. Crain, Professor, Washington State University
Denny C. Davis, Professor, Washington State University
Dale E. Calkins, Associate Professor, University of Washington
Ken Gentili, Engineering, Tacoma Community College
Key design competencies which will be addressed during the first two years of the curriculum will be identified so that students who enter the junior year of an engineering program within the state of Washington will be able to build on those competencies as they participate in design activities through the remainder of their program. Curriculum materials will be developed to meet learning objectives for introductory design in order to fit a variety of institutions, and to serve students with diverse backgrounds and interests. Faculty workshops across the state will transfer these learning objectives and strategies for achieving them in a variety of settings, and they will prepare faculty to adopt materials and methods to use in classes with diverse student populations.
This paper will discuss the details of how this project will be carried out and the outcomes expected. The project is funded by NSF, Division of Undergraduate Education.
In the state of Washington, twenty-three community colleges and three state regional universities teach pre-engineering to students who transfer to the University of Washington (UW), Washington State University (WSU) or one of six private institutions. The result is that a large percentage of upper division students have transferred into the institution at which they are completing their engineering degree. As a result of many years of communication and coordination through the Washington Council for Engineering and Related Technical Education (WCERTE) [1], students enter their upper division work with a consistent grounding in mathematics, chemistry, physics, engineering graphics and CAD, mechanics (statics, dynamics and mechanics of materials) and some have coursework in materials science, circuits, and thermodynamics. For Washington State University, typically 60%of third and fourth year engineering students have extensive transfer credit and most of those have a full two years.
In recent years it has been recognized that industry has a need for students who are well grounded in design competencies and who are ready to contribute with little additional training. ABET has recognized the need for emphasizing design across the curriculum, not merely in a few selected courses. Through their experience in previous projects, the authors recognized the need and opportunity to introduce design competencies into courses during the first two years to serve as a basis for developing more sophisticated design competencies during the upper division courses. For the introduction of design competencies in lower division courses to be effective in Washington, it would be necessary for students at any institution in the state to have the opportunity to develop design competencies which would be required upon entry into the upper division coursework.
This project, titled Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE), sponsored by NSF, WSU, UW and Tacoma Community College has been started to address the development of design competencies in students during their first two years of engineering. The objectives of the project are (a) establish a curricular structure for well-defined, transferable introductory design education in an environment of diverse institutions, curricula and students; (b) produce transportable curricular materials and instructional methods that support effective ``integrated'' engineering design education in transfer environments; (c) enable faculty at a variety of institutions to adopt, implement and evaluate exemplary materials and methods suitable for their programs and their students; and (d) achieve increased enrollment and retention of students, especially women, minorities and disabled, in early design courses.
A series of workshop sessions and activities were conducted with faculty at WCERTE and at WSU, with the project Advisory Panel for TIDEE, and with industrial advisory board members. The purpose of these activities was to verify the categories of design competencies which were included in a variety of design process descriptions. The outcome of these was a set of seven design competency categories which were to be the foundation of the TIDEE project. Those seven are:
The authors are convinced that these seven competency categories provide a foundation which is universal across the engineering disciplines and which provides an opportunity for agreement about elements within the categories which should and can be learned by students during their first two years of an engineering curriculum.
In order to better understand these seven competency categories and to identify the elements of each category which students should master prior to the upper division design activities, a tentative list of elements which students should master prior to graduation at the end of the BS degree in engineering was generated. This tentative list of elements provided a context from which those to be addressed during the first two years was selected. This was done by a diverse group of 24 faculty who attended a TIDEE-WCERTE workshop in April. Working in groups of four, they added to and deleted from the overall tentative list of elements. They then identified each element as: (B) basic level, should be accomplished prior to junior year, (I) intermediate level, may be accomplished prior to junior year but must be completed prior to graduation, or (G) graduation level, should only be accomplished in upper division, prior to graduation. The whole group of workshop participants then looked at all of the elements listed as (B) and refined that list to an selected set of elements or competencies which should be accomplished during the first two years of engineering curricula.
This set of competencies will provide the basis for curriculum and faculty development during the coming year. Evaluation at the end of the year and further faculty development workshops will refine the list of selected first two year elements to be used as the basis for activities during the following year. Following the third year of this process, the list of selected elements should be well refined and accepted across the state as expected competencies for entering junior level students.
The next steps of curriculum development will be to identify measurable learning objectives for each element. These will then serve as the basis for identifying appropriate modules, projects and activities for lower division courses in order to focus student learning on the development of these competencies in themselves. The elements selected for this year's focus are the following:
The faculty development phase of this project is coupled with further curriculum development. Because the faculty involved in engineering education throughout the state are in a variety of educational environments, curricular materials need to be flexible and faculty need to have experience in adapting materials to their own specific situation. The workshops to be conducted each year have as a goal, ``To help faculty who teach introductory engineering courses at higher education institutions in Washington to participate in the development of design curriculum and to understand techniques for assisting students to develop elements of design competencies in themselves''.
The workshops include the following activities:
The literature related to introductory design through coalitions (ECSEL, Synthesis, etc.) and individual reports provides a wealth of successful projects. Thus, faculty participants may access potential projects which can be matched to competency elements included in them. They can then develop instructional materials to be used in their own situation. Following that experience, the faculty teams use the design process to develop new ideas for short activities and for projects which fit into the learning objectives of an existing course.
Through these workshops, faculty will learn techniques for teaching introductory design in the lower division and will have developed instructional materials to use in their own classes. They will also have developed the confidence to adopt and develop other projects and activities to meet their specific situation. The curricular materials which are developed will then be shared with faculty at other institutions.
As a part of this project, a High School Summer Camp for minority students is being held each summer at Tacoma Community College and Washington State University. The summer camp is an opportunity to use instructional design activities with minority students to determine activities which are attractive to them and to introduce them to the excitement and challenge of engineering design. Introductory design activities, in addition to helping students learn design competencies, provide students with a better understanding of engineering activities and the way engineers approach problems than do the bulk of mathematics, physics and chemistry courses students take during the first two years. It is expected that the incorporation of the design competency elements in the first two years of engineering will aid in retention of students in engineering.
Follow-up activities will be planned each year for faculty who are participating through the faculty workshops. The project leaders will be available throughout the year for consultation by phone and for some on-site visits. A one-day follow-up workshop will be held at the end of the year for the faculty participants to share their experiences and to evaluate the selected elements and the instructional materials which they used. The outcomes from one year will provide the input for the next year's workshop where the competency elements will be reviewed and revised and new modules, projects and activities will be developed. Results and evaluation will also be presented each year at the spring WCERTE meeting in order to inform faculty throughout the state of the progress being made on this program.
At the end of this project there will be a set of design competency elements which are expected to be learned and utilized by all engineering students at any institution in Washington prior to starting upper division course work. These elements will address the seven design competency categories of Teamwork, Information Gathering, Problem Definition, Idea Generation, Evaluation and Decision Making, Implementation, and Communication. This will permit the upper division programs in specific disciplines to develop design competencies in depth, building on a common foundation. The projects and activities in which these elements are developed will be included in a variety of ways to suit the particular circumstances of the various institutions.
In the future it is planned to assist upper division programs in developing competency elements which suit the specific discipline and which students should develop prior to graduation. The elements from the first two years will provide a basis for this activity and this project will demonstrate how to incorporate the competency elements into the curriculum.
The support of this project by Washington State University, the University of Washington, Tacoma Community College and the National Science Foundation, Division of Undergraduate Education is gratefully acknowledged.