Open-Ended Design Project: An Effect Tool for Technical and Professional Growth

One of the effective tools that was widely expanded through the last twenty years is Project-Based Learning (PBL). The 2000 ABET accreditation requirements were among the reasons that expanded its use in engineering education. With the recently introduced ABET students’ outcomes, there is a very active discussion among engineering schools to explore teaching tools that address the newly integrated outcome. PBL is still on the top of the list of these tools. One of the challenges in the PBL is time and the balance needed to cover the technical content of the courses. Unlike traditional teaching tools, projects need time and students need more time to cross this bridge between theory and application. Scientific research, teamwork skills, engineering problem solving and professionalism are among the benefits/challenges for this approach.

The current work will focus on open-ended design projects that were used in a sophomore and senior level engineering courses. In the first project, sophomore students were asked to design a bike rack for buses in a Statics course. In the second project, senior students were asked to design aerodynamics drag reduction tools for semi-trucks in a CFD course. For both projects, students were given the design challenge and asked to form teams and address the problem in five weeks toward the end of the semester. To assist the students in the project timeline, they were asked to give ungraded projects updates followed by a general class discuss to exchange challenges and ideas. In both projects, a final professionally written report and a class presentation were required and carried the full grade of the projects. This balance between graded and ungraded project activities assist the students to exchange ideas freely in the update presentations and enhance the mutual learning.

Beside the technical skills, students’ professionalize and overall growth were clearly evident in their performance. Another parameter that significantly contributed to this growth is the fact that every student was asked to complete three semesters of industrial cooperative education (Co-op). The three Co-op semesters were as follow: summer of the sophomore year, the spring of the junior year and fall of the senior year. The Statics course was taken in the fall of the sophomore year just before the Co-op and the CFD course was taken in the spring of the senior year right after they come back from Co-op.

Projects details, mapping to old and new ABET outcomes, and samples from students’ work will be used in the discussion. The goal of this paper is to add to this transitioning effort to the new ABET outcomes and address the use of design project as an effective tool/indicator for students’ technical and professional growth.