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Work in Progress: Visualizing Design Team Analytics for Representing and Understanding Design Teams’ Process

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Conference

2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Salt Lake City, Utah

Publication Date

June 23, 2018

Start Date

June 23, 2018

End Date

July 27, 2018

Conference Session

DEED Postcard Poster Session

Tagged Division

Design in Engineering Education

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

16

DOI

10.18260/1-2--31316

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/31316

Download Count

420

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Paper Authors

biography

Corey T Schimpf The Concord Consoritum Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-2706-3282

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Corey Schimpf is a Learning Analytics Scientist with interest in design research, learning analytics, research methods and under-representation in engineering, A major strand of his work focuses on developing and analyzing learning analytics that model students’ cognitive states or strategies through fine-grained computer-logged data from open-ended technology-centered science and engineering projects. His dissertation research explored the use of Minecraft to teach early engineering college students about the design process.

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biography

Rob Sleezer Minnesota State University, Mankato

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Rob Sleezer earned his Ph.D. in Microelectronics-Photonics from the University of Arkansas. He attended Oklahoma State University where he graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is currently a faculty member at Twin Cities Engineering which is in the department of Integrated Engineering at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

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Charles Xie

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Abstract

Engineers typically approach design in teams, particularly when dealing with complex problems that may need to be decomposed into several parts or subsystems to be designed individually and integrated. Team design projects during students’ college years can serve as critical experiences to prepare for professional work on design teams. However, the volume of actions across team members and iterative nature of engineering design makes tracking, representing and learning from design teams’ actions difficult and time-consuming. This work proposes developing design team analytics as a tool for representing and understanding how students collectively navigate and address complex designs, by leveraging a computer-aided design (CAD) platform with action-logging functionality.

A class of 28 juniors and seniors in a project-based engineering program at a small Midwestern University worked in teams of four-to-five to design a distributed system of solar arrays for their local community while balancing energy need and budgetary constraints. Students were given a suite of 8 solarizable sites including flattop, pitched-roof buildings, and parking lot locations. Students then used these sites to design, evaluate, and select a subset for their final design. Energy3D, a CAD platform for constructing buildings and solar arrays that features many analytical tools, served as the primary design platform. Importantly, Energy3D logs users’ actions such as adding a solar panel or running an annual solar yield. The data from these logs was examined in terms of individual and collective contributions resulting in visualizations of the teams’ design processes across several metrics including: construction, optimization, and numerical analysis.

Preliminary results for this work-in-progress indicate that students mostly designed sequentially across solarizable sites, with little concurrent activity. Optimization patterns vary between teams and show some relation to teams’ final design(s) performance.

Schimpf, C. T., & Sleezer, R., & Xie, C. (2018, June), Work in Progress: Visualizing Design Team Analytics for Representing and Understanding Design Teams’ Process Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--31316

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