Abstract:

Product design and development is one of the advanced level subjects taught in Engineering schools in 4th year at Undergraduate level. It is usually a 3-4 credit hours course where 1 hour may be used as a Tutorial or Laboratory with extra contact hours. The subject covers fundamentals of a product development process and various phases of technical design process from planning to testing of prototypes and even economic analysis. The subject could be extremely boring for the students if taught purely as a theoretical approach to new product design process or could be an immensely exciting if some hands on practices, learning/using of advanced Engineering software and a semester project is included in its delivery. The teachers may follow any approach depending upon the assigned credit hours to the course or their own industrial background and teaching preferences. The context or syllabus followed in all the universities may be similar based on the latest text and reference books etc, but the delivery may be different based on teachers and learners preferences as well as availability of time and resources. This researcher has been teaching this course to 4th year students over the past several years and have adopted various approaches during the semesters to establish their advantages and limitations. Present study results are an outcome of at least over 5 years work and teaching this course for well over 10 times to undergraduate students in a private sector university in Saudi Arabia. A comprehensive literature review has been done to prepare the background for this research work and also to understand how similar subjects are taught around the world. The work done by the researcher is analysed on the basis of past literature and reported pedagogical approaches adopted by researchers. The author established that this course requires more than 4 credit hours of class room lectures and at least 3 contact hours laboratory work. Such an effort by the teacher as well as students could produce some wonderful tangible outcomes at the end of the course. These may include innovative design of new products, research papers, posters and even patents sometimes. Least of all the students are able to undergo through detailed activities of a product design and development process which they will otherwise see in the advanced research laboratories of various industries. This research also includes summaries of case studies based on various projects which lead to publication of papers in international conferences as well as patent applications based on innovative designs developed during this course in a typical semester of 16 weeks. The paper also provides various methodologies of teaching students with examples of products that increased their interest in the subject

Keywords:

Pedagogical approaches, New product design, Learning by doing, innovative designs, Subject delivery.