Conference Session

Teams and Teamwork in Design II

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Mark Chang, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering; Allen Downey, Olin College of Engineering

Tagged Divisions

Design in Engineering Education

approach to assigning students to project teams for ayear-long, industry-sponsored senior capstone course. Successful assignment requires knowl-edge of at least individual project requirements, student skills, student personalities, andstudent project preferences. This mix of hard skills, soft skills, and interpersonal impres-sions requires human involvement to produce a high-quality assignment. The importance offaculty input often requires that the assignment process be labor- and time-intensive.Our approach attempts to reduce the time required to perform this assignment by selectivelyautomating parts of the task flow. An automated search uses a randomized greedy algorithmcombined with local optimizations to explore a large space of solutions

Conference Session

Assessing Design Coursework

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Marcia Friesen, University of Manitoba

Tagged Divisions

Design in Engineering Education

society. In thisessay, Thomas Kuhn’s concept of incommensurability, aspects of constructivist epistemology,and Thomas Green’s framework of professional conscience are used to structure an expandedframework for engineering design, and more broadly, for engineering education and practiceitself.Developments in Engineering Design EducationEngineering design continues to be focal point of discussion and activity in undergraduateengineering education, with the broadly-stated objective to educate engineers with practice-readydesign skills and the soft skills required of practicing professionals. Engineering designeducation requires an integration of mathematics, basic sciences, engineering sciences, andcomplementary studies, facilitated through

Conference Session

Teams and Teamwork in Design I

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Keith Sheppard, Stevens Institute of Technology; Peter Dominick, Stevens Institute of Technology; Edward Blicharz, Stevens Institute of Technology

Tagged Divisions

Design in Engineering Education

design or design-relatedcourse every semester9 with the four courses in the freshman and sophomore years (EngineeringDesign 1 thru 4) being of particular importance to the early development of various “soft skill”threads, including teaming. These first four design courses are core engineering curriculumcourses; later design courses in the sequence are disciplinary, culminating in the two-semester Page 13.399.3capstone design project. In the first four courses the students are assigned by the instructor toteams rather than allowed to choose their team-mates. This produces diversity of interests andskills and as such is reflective of the reality