Investigation of design skills attained through a first-year multidisciplinary engineering design project

CONTEXT A new, core, first-year, engineering design and build unit was piloted at Monash University in Semester 1, 2022. A 9 week-long design project was developed with the aim of encouraging 5 member student teams to apply their new design, Computer-aided Drawing (CAD) and 3D printing skills. A competitive grading approach intended to reward innovation and optimisation of these deployable structures with static applied loads. PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate quality of delivery and the attainment of selected engineering-design skills via a multidisciplinary design project relative to the selected benchmark; the Weir-WARMAN competition. This research is intended to provide recommendations for the further development of the project for successive offerings, and a reference for the implementations of similar projects. APPROACH Pre-existing survey instruments drawn from the literature and specific to design projects will be used to gauge the success of the project developed and the attainment of self-reported design skills. A survey will be developed and students will be invited to participate. Their responses will be analysed to discern the efficacy of the project in encouraging engineering-design skills. Follow-up interviews with the students and Teaching Associates (TAs) in the unit will be conducted to source additional qualitative insights. Student self-reflection is the primary tool for quantifying changes in student learning and design skill attainment. RESULTS Students responded positively to the project and the changes in their self-reported design skills were comparable to the benchmark of the Weir-WARMAN competition. However, reflections and observations from our TAs indicated that the students hesitated to utilise simple mechanisms, or to optimise their structures for self-weight as was intended for the project. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS This study was able to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the project related to design-skill developments. While surveys indicate an increase in student confidence in the use of engineering tools such as 3D Printing and CAD, observation of student outputs does not strongly support this. Therefore, several recommendations to address the weaknesses of the project for future offerings are provided.