DESIGN DAYS BOOT CAMP: ENHANCING STUDENT MOTIVATION TO START THINKING IN ENGINEERING DESIGN TERMS IN THE FIRST YEAR

Abstract - Engineering design is a core aspect of engineering education. Students might not appreciate the importance of engineering design early on, especially in the first term of their academic study. In this paper, we propose an approach for motivating students to think early about engineering design, namely at the start of their first academic term. The approach entails organizing an immersive design boot camp -"Design Days" - that replaces lectures for the first two days of the term. During the two days, students are divided into randomly assigned teams, and provided specifications to work on a design challenge. As part of the challenge, students are incentivized to fully understand the problem before attempting to solve it, instructed to follow a design process and apply iterative design, and asked to document their design and its rationale. The proposed method was successfully applied in Fall 2016. The approach will be applied again in Fall 2017 with minor modifications based on student feedback.