Work in Progress: Measuring the Effects of a Making-Based Senior Design Project in Engineering Technology

In a pilot corresponding with the founding of the university-wide maker space at Texas State University, the Engineering Technology senior design class completed a making-based senior design project. This pilot semester also represented the first semester of a formal senior design experience for Engineering Technology majors at Texas State University rather than culminating their college experience with a capstone-style industrial internship. This change was the result of feedback from the department’s Industry Advisory Board, which requested that the internship program to be converted to an early, cornerstone-style experience for the students. The objective of the new senior design course was to provide students with the working knowledge of systematic product development process covering all major design phases including product planning, conceptual design, embodiment design, and detail design. One major distinctive feature of the new senior design course is its multidisciplinary nature in the sense that students within design teams come from different Engineering Technology concentrations, namely, mechanical, manufacturing, electrical, and environmental engineering technology. Interdisciplinary team work is increasingly becoming prevalent in today’s global market and the new senior design course is intended to prepare students for working in environments where crossing traditional professional boundaries is a necessity for promoting innovation and critical thinking. For the study, the students in the course took the Engineering Design Self-Efficacy measurement tool at the start of their senior design project and then again at the end of the semester to try to measure the change in their self-efficacy, or their belief in their own ability to conduct engineering design, over the course of the senior project class. The construction of the prototypes for the senior design project occurred in Bobcat Made, the new maker space. This paper will describe the structure of this new senior design course, the project completed during this first semester, and the results of the preversus post-project surveys. In future semesters the projects available to the students in this senior design course will be a mixture of ones requiring use of the maker space and those where it would be optional to use in order to assess to what extent does the use of a maker space while completing the senior design project have on students’ Engineering Design Self-Efficacy. Introduction A senior design class was recently added to the Engineering Technology curriculum at Texas State University in lieu of having a capstone-style industrial internship. This change came about at the suggestion of the Department of Engineering Technology’s combined Industrial Advisory Board. All students still have a required internship as a part of their degree programs, but those internships are now early, cornerstone-style experiences. The resulting new senior design program is cross-disciplinary as all of the concentrations in Engineering Technology share the same senior design course. The introduction of this new course also coincided with the founding of the university-wide maker space, Bobcat Made. For the pilot semester reported in this paper, the students in this new senior design course created their prototype in the maker space, providing the opportunity to examine changes in their Engineering Design Self-Efficacy (EDSE). This paper describes this new course, the prototype created in the maker space during this pilot semester and the preliminary preversus post-project results from the EDSE tool. Course Description The senior design course (TECH 4398) in the Department of Engineering Technology is the culmination of four years of engineering technology education where students bring together their technical and non-technical knowledge towards the completion of a product development project. One unique aspect of the TECH 4398 is that it is a required course for all ET specializations. Therefore, the instructor has the opportunity to form multidisciplinary design teams composed of students from different disciplines including Mechanical, Manufacturing, Environmental, and Electrical Engineering Technology based on the nature of each project. It should be noted that this course was developed from the outset based upon using multidisciplinary teams and, therefore, there is no prior experience available to compare these experiences to working with single discipline senior design teams in the Department of Engineering Technology. Since manufacturing knowledge is the common thread that goes through all ET specializations, the design teams are expected to create high-quality functional prototypes at the end. The projects are solicited from external sponsors who can act as both potential customers for the project and project advisors. The design projects involve designing a product per customer requirements, fabricating a functional prototype, and testing the fabricated prototype. The design teams are expected to follow the systematic product development process including requirements planning, conceptual design, embodiment design, and detail design. The instructed design methodology is generic enough to be applicable to a wide range of products. The class meets once per week and is composed of lecture and lab sections. The lecture section,, which is limited to the first six weeks of the semester, is focused on providing information about design tools, design process, and design terminology. The underlying goal is to familiarize students with the structured design thinking and curb the deficiencies induced by ill-structured and open-ended nature of design projects. The design methodology taught in this course in based on Pahl and Beitz theory of systematic design and Ulrich and Eppinger methodology for product design and development (Pahl et al, 2007 and Dieter and Schmidt, 2009). After the midterm presentation, wherein the teams present their conceptual designs and receive approval from their sponsors, the entire class time is dedicated to modeling, fabrication, and design documentation. The details of each phase of design, together with the deliverables of each phase, are described below. The four phases of the product development process described below define the four phases of the course as well. Product Planning (Week 1-2): In this phase, design teams are expected to understand the underlying problem that is intended to be addressed by the final product and develop the projects mission statement. The mission statement of the project contains the broad description of the product, the main assumptions, the key business goals, the primary and secondary markets for the product, and the main stakeholders of the product. The design teams are cautioned that the product description that is created in the product planning phase should only identify the product’s basic functions and it should avoid implying any specific concept. The mission statement serves as the project contract that defines the scope of the project and its main constraints. Also, the design teams are expected to create a project work plan represented as a Gantt chart in this phase. Conceptual Design (Week 3-6): Conceptual design is the most demanding phase of the project in TECH 4398 in terms of the variety and the depth of design activities. In the early stages of the conceptual design phase, the design teams are expected to work closely with the customer to identify the design requirements and categorize and prioritize them as constraints and criteria. Design teams are provided with special guidelines for properly formulating customer requirements in order to improve the clarity and completeness of requirement statements. The identified requirements are then translated into engineering specifications using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method. Multiple concepts are created guided by brainstorming tools such as C-Sketching and 6-3-5 method and then combined using Morph Charts. The generated concepts are evaluated using concept evaluation matrix in order to arrive at one or two final concepts to be carried over to the Embodiment Design phase. At the end of the conceptual design phase, the design teams are expected to develop proof-of-concept prototypes that only convey form-related information. Embodiment Design (Week 7-10): In this phase, the selected concepts are further developed into a product that delivers the required functions and can be produced. The main focus in this phase is on architecture design, configuration design, and parametric design. Design for assembly, manufacturing, and environment rules are also applied to the design artifacts at this stage. The design teams are expected to develop functional prototypes by the end of this phase. The design teams are also expected to develop the CAD model of their products in this phase. Detail Design (Week 9-14): At this stage, the focus in on generation of design documentation including detailed drawings, assembly charts, bill of material, and operation process charts. Design teams also conduct economic analysis in order to estimate the direct and indirect manufacturing costs of the final design. Course Evaluation Students are evaluated based on five criteria, namely, presentation and communication, teamwork, design product, design process, and design knowledge with different relative weights. The instructor and the project sponsor participate in the evaluation process Design Knowledge: The lecture session focuses on providing information about design tools, design process, and design terminology. Student’s knowledge of systematic design process is tested through a single midterm exam. There is no final exam for this course. Presentation: Presentation involves both written and oral communication. There is one interim report and one final report. There are multiple design review meetings throughout the semeste