Quantitative Methods for Studying Design Protocols by Jeff WT Kan & John S Gero

Author:Jeff WT Kan & John S Gero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

4.3.1 Participants and the Experimental Setup

The participants of this case were second-year Mechanical Engineering students enrolled in a design course—Engineering Design and Economics—that aimed to expose them to engineering design and design methodologies at an early stage in their professional development. The 3-credit design course is centred on active-learning opportunities that allow students to apply their learning in engineering design. Classroom meetings are typically devoted to hands-on team based activities, which range from product dissections (internal combustion engines, air compressors, electric drills, disposable cameras, etc.) to various speculative design scenarios. These activities provide an opportunity for the instructor to perform individual mentoring and instruction. In addition to these in-class activities, student design teams work together out-of-class on a semester project where they design a novel consumer product.

The data collected of this study represents the beginning of the students’ formal design education and experience. At this stage, the students’ design education is limited to a 4-week “Introduction to Engineering Design” module in their first-year introductory engineering course. In order to make sure students are novices, those with significant design experience (either professionally or through prior academic experience), were screened through a preliminary interview and were not selected as participants.

Participants were asked to attend two out-of-class experiments: one at the beginning of the fall semester of their sophomore year; the other in the middle of the spring semester of the same academic year. In these experiments, pairs of students worked together at a white board to solve a speculative design task. A total of 28 students (16 in fall 2009 and 12 in spring 2010) participated the design session. Figure 4.18 shows examples of typical sketches produced during the design session.

Fig. 4.18Participant white-board sketch examples

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