Collection

2009 Fall ASEE Middle Atlantic Section Conference

Authors

Kevin Dahm; Thomas Merrill; William Riddell

are examples of how specific teams met this criterion for success: • “Rain-Catch Irrigation System.” The team chose to focus on a particular village in The Gambia, where most of the population is comprised of subsistence farmers and essentially all of the annual rainfall occurs within a 4-5 month period. The team identified a community building with a corrugated metal roof suitable for a gutter system, researched costs of specific building materials in The Gambia, sized and costed a concrete water storage facility, presented research regarding the time and water required to grow pumpkins and squash, and quantified the number of acres that could be irrigated during the dry season for this length of

Conference Session

Design for Society and the Environment

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Christopher Williams, Virginia Tech; Richard Goff, Virginia Tech; Janis Terpenny, Virginia Tech; Jenny Lo, Virginia Tech; Tamara Knott, Virginia Tech; Karen Gilbert, Virginia Tech

Tagged Divisions

Design in Engineering Education

ScalePast projects of “Exploration of Engineering Design” have been speculative in nature; studentswere given a design problem statement and had to speculate both the customers’ needs and thecontext of the problem. For example, one semester project featured students designing and Page 14.2.4building devices capable of launching pumpkins. While such projects promote basic problem-solving and resource management skills, their limited context and concrete objectives did notprovide a significant opportunity for the students to achieve all of the course’s learningobjectives (e.g., interpreting customer needs, managing a design project, framing an open