Abstract:

This research study is about teaching a one-year long engineering design concept to second- and third-year undergraduate students. This design module provides an avenue for students to experience an integrated design process where technology plays a central role. Students will go through detailed design steps from reviewing the conceptual system design, breaking down the system design into component design, prototyping at various stages of design, fabrication, and validating the design intents, in a team setting. However, students often encounter several problems during the whole design project. These problems affect the way in which the students learn and work together as a team. Some of the main problems raised by the studies relate to students facing difficulties to assimilate theories and knowledge that they have learnt to the design process. In an academic setting, students are not able to perform systems thinking and consider the broader issues related to their problem statements. Their approaches to design project tend to be narrow in scope, conservative and skewed towards their familiar set of tools. Students are also averse to trying out new things to avoid failures on such graded projects that count towards their graduation score. The motivation to self-learn and explore is low. In this paper, we seek to identify what the problem areas which the undergraduate students encounter during the design process and understand how these problem areas affect the way students learn and work together. We will then investigate different approaches for the students to learn and work together effectively, and understand the effects of these approaches on learning for the individual student and collectively as a team.

Keywords:

Team learning, design process, effective learning.