GIFTS: Designing and Making an Olympic Cauldron: A First-Year Mechanical Engineering Design Challenge

Micah Lande

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Conference: 15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE)
Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Publication Date: July 28, 2024
Start Date: July 28, 2024
End Date: July 30, 2024
Page Count: 3
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--48618
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48618
Download Count: 77

Paper Authors

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Micah Lande South Dakota School of Mines and Technology orcid.org/0000-0003-4964-5654

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Micah Lande, PhD is an Assistant Professor and E.R. Stensaas Chair for Engineering Education in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Dr. Lande directs the Holistic Engineering Learning Lab and Observatory. He teaches human-centered engineering design, design thinking, and design innovation courses. Dr. Lande researches how technical and non-technical people learn and apply design thinking and making processes to their work. He is interested in the intersection of designerly epistemic identities and vocational pathways. Dr. Lande received his B.S. in Engineering (Product Design), M.A. in Education (Learning, Design and Technology) and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (Design Education) from Stanford University.

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Abstract

This GIFTS paper will discuss a design challenge in a first-year engineering class to design and rapidly prototype a cardboard tower in the spirit of the Olympic cauldron. Student design teams work together with material constraints to work through a creative design process to imagine and build their structure.

To any given design challenge, students may have multiple feasible ideas for success. They can imagine multiple possible concepts, down select and move forward with a solution. Time may also be a factor to move forward, with often limited allowance for iteration, particularly within the constraint of a class. It is interesting to see how their concepts evolve and mature to prototypes along the way; we implemented a broader timeframe for a design challenge to both allow students to practice iteration and better understand what types of learnings helped to revise their concepts along the way.

Over a week, students are introduced to design process steps like brainstorming and prototyping, and then given sufficient time to imagine, design, and fabricate multiple iterations. With a this system-level engineering design challenge in an introductory design course, concepts and prototypes imagined and created by students were tracked and their design processes were captured, supplemented by follow-up reflective interviews.

In general, it is useful to better understand the possible scaffolding of design challenges with additional information or probes to get students thinking about their assumptions and making tradeoff considerations to a more successful solution. There are implications for such an approach to design challenges to allow for both engineering analysis and iterative design through tinkering to achieve well-balanced set of considerations and appreciation of context in which design solutions can be considered.

Citation
Format

Lande, M. (2024, July), GIFTS: Designing and Making an Olympic Cauldron: A First-Year Mechanical Engineering Design Challenge Paper presented at 15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE), Boston, Massachusetts. 10.18260/1-2--48618