GIFTS: Marching LEGO Ducks towards Critical Ideation

Brian Patrick O'Connell

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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--48622
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48622
Download Count: 34

Paper Authors

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Brian Patrick O'Connell Northeastern University orcid.org/0000-0002-6626-256X

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Dr. O'Connell is an associate teaching professor in the First-Year Engineering program at Northeastern University. He studied at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2006 then worked in industry as a Mechanical Engineer working on ruggedized submarine optronic systems. He returned to academia in 2011 at Tufts University planning to work towards more advanced R&D but fell for engineering education and educational technologies. His research now focuses on developing engineering technologies and learning environments, specifically makerspaces, to support engineering education at many levels. He's also heavily involved with his local FIRST Robotics Challenge team as a mentor.

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Abstract

Generating a wide range of solutions can be a difficult challenge for First-year engineering students. Conceptually, exploring more of the solution space is difficult for them to understand as it is not something they’ve thought critically about regarding how to push those boundaries. Without guidance for what makes solutions further apart from one another in the design space, they tend to focus on variations of their initial ideas to meet arbitrarily set project minimums. This GIFT discusses an in-class activity that introduces ideation metrics to quantifiably assess the variety of the solution space, a measurement of the extent of the explored solution space, and novelty, a measurement of how unusual or unexpected an idea is compared to the other ideas. The activity utilizes ideation metrics established by Shah, Vargas-hernandez, and Smith and showcases them through a LEGO activity in which students are given a set number of LEGO pieces and told to make a duck. We then review their ducks and assess the class data set for its variety and the individual ducks for their novelty using these metrics and an online form and spreadsheet designed to collect the data and showcase the results swiftly.

This lesson and activity has been implemented in 8 first-year design courses over the last two years with many positive reactions, noted in student evaluations as a favorite. Even though utilizing these metrics has not yet become a requirement in design projects, several student design teams have used them as evidence of their critical engagement with the engineering design process. They used the variety metric to showcase their exploration of a broad solution space. They incorporated the novelty metric as a rating in their decision analyses when selecting which idea to pursue.

Citation
Format

O'Connell, B. P. (2024, July), GIFTS: Marching LEGO Ducks towards Critical Ideation Paper presented at 15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE), Boston, Massachusetts. 10.18260/1-2--48622