Abstract:

Background:
The 21st century has accompanied the new epoch of methods and machines for design. Modernizations are characterized by acting in a new way and thinking diversely. The best way to put modernizations is through sharing experiences, communicating, and collaborating with others to build a comprehensive understanding of concepts, ideas, and a range of practicable manifestations like building prototypes. In an industrial scenario, prototyping refers to creating a working model and test from the perspective of stakeholders and users. It is an early mock-up or an iteration of the product in the early stage, demonstrating its core functionalities. Prototyping becomes much more significant in the case of mechatronics products, towards finding flaws, reducing waste, and usability testing early. In case one skips this step, leading product subpar in the market. So prototyping is essential to the design and manufacturing process. Some of the benefits of prototyping include early feedback, saving cost and time, a better understanding of the design intent and validation before product development.

In the academic setting, there is a need for providing prototyping experience to the students at the early stage of their graduation. In this context, a course titled Engineering Exploration was introduced, a three-credit course designed for first-year engineering students that adopt Project-Based Learning (PBL) pedagogy. Every year this course is delivered to 1100 students of the University. Students work in a team and follow five steps of the engineering design process, including problem definition, conceptual design, preliminary design, detailed design, and design documentation to complete the project. The deliverables of the project include problem definition, four or more alternative designs, selection of best alternative, describing the product architecture, virtual implementation that included 3D modeling, circuit design, and flow chart design followed with building of physical prototype to realize the functions as per the problem definition. This paper focuses on evaluating intervention by adding a phase of frugal prototyping between virtual implementation and prototyping.

Problem space:
Following were the two dimensions that necessitated the intervention and current study 1. The faculty observed that students do not make an evaluated decision while deciding the dimensions of the prototype as a result, they end up in wastage of resources and space. 2. Students fail to realize the dimensions and units of the physical prototype even after the virtual implementation phase. These reasons motivated the faculty to make the intervention of introducing frugal prototyping as an additional phase.

Methodology:
Introduction of frugal prototyping as a phase was done to the experimental set of students and the final prototypes of both experimental and control group students were compared through the prototype analysis. The interview was conducted to purposively sampled faculty and students to understand the student and faculty perspective of the intervention.

Results:
At the outset, frugal prototyping helped the students in terms of boosting their confidence, clarity of the dimensions of the prototype, assembling the parts and faculty expressed positive opinion about the intervention however detailed analysis of the interview data is required to arrive at the final themes.

Keywords:

Frugal Prototyping, Engineering, Design Process.