Towards a Framework to Support Engineering Design Student Projects

Sharad Oberoi
2018
Students working on engineering design project teams face many challenges including information management. The students collaborate among themselves, share design knowledge, and negotiate with each other, faculty members and the client, in order to create engineered artifacts. This process often involves reuse of prior knowledge and the creation of new knowledge within the context of the problem. Although some of the work is done individually, a major portion is accomplished through team
more » ... ctions, either in meetings with the project team or with subsets of the team. Students communicate in face-to-face meetings, on the phone, via email, in chat sessions and with text messages; and they exchange text, images, web links, equations, and technical drawings. However, as the project proceeds, locating the right piece of information from the multiple sources becomes an increasingly difficult task. Prior studies have shown that students often have different perceptions of the project and their contribution in it (Laurillard 1979). Externalizing the shared vision as the project evolves can have advantages for the students. Since most of the knowledge creation by students occurs without the instructor present, students often deviate from the project's stated objective. Instructors intend to assess student learning outcomes, but have more ready access to product outcomes. Given this constraint, the final grade is often based on the quality of the product and on the self-reported functioning of the team. Even in cases where the evidence of student collaboration process is accessible through discussion forums and e-mail threads, making sense of this data is difficult due to a lack of practical, analytical tools to aggregate the information. Towards a Framework to Support Engineering Design Student Projects vi The first research question of this thesis addresses the problem of information management in engineering design projects. The students' design deliberations, as externalized in their discussion threads and through [...]
doi:10.1184/r1/6724013 fatcat:vlap7vsdinc2nbyhgof6kzg7gq