The following article was recently published in the International Journal of Engineering Education. The article's lead author is my colleague Dr. Vanessa Svihla and my fellow co-author is Dr. Ken Diller. I believe this work makes a significant contribution to the incorporation of engineering principles into project based instruction, focusing specifically on the idea of design. As many of you know, engineering design is a collaborative and complex process, and our understanding of how to support student teams in learning to design remains limited. By considering in-situ student design teams in a capstone biomedical engineering course, we are afforded the opportunity to contrast two version of a non-sponsored project, then consider expert perceptions of their later sponsored designs. Findings indicate that a redesigned project led students to value customer needs and to use them to define the design problem, whereas in a kit-based version this did not occur. We also found that greater perceived opportunities to negotiate one's understanding within a team predicted more innovative designs. -Dr. Petrosino
Svihla, Petrosino Diller (2012) Learning to Design
