Concept Evaluation

This module is intended for junior engineering students in any discipline. The module can be downloaded as a PDF file.

Teaching concept evaluation in engineering often utilises engineering based problems. Unfortunately, first year students typically lack the experience and familiarity with the range of engineering methods and topics that are a prerequisite for the introduction of the traditional design process. To compensate for this, many problems tend to be comprised of clear, theoretically based textbook problems centered on formulaic manipulation. As such, these “tame” problems rely on will traveled solution paths that always end up with the same answer providing little value in highlighting the benefit of the traditional design process.

To appreciate the design process it is necessary for students to attack problems where there is no identifiable solution path or where they have no concept of what the answer might be. The problems need to encourage students to nurture their synthesis skills (i.e. their ability to bring together different points of view) rather than their analysis skills, which are already nurtured in the rest of their curriculum. These “wicked” problems are difficult to introduce at the first year level as the students typically lack adequate engineering experience. However, “wicked” problems can still be explored by utilizing the knowledge students have already developed simply to function in the world around them.

Problems that require the understanding of consumer behaviour or moral judgment can easily form “wicked” problems that first-year students can tackle. Therefore, this module consists of two non-engineering problems that provide a solid foundation for concept evaluation. The first is a marketing problem that deals with the survival of small drug stores in the 21st century. The second is a legal problem that requires students to make a moral judgment. To extend concept evaluation further into the traditional models, a new method of introducing design reviews and traditional engineering concept evaluation tools are included. To introduce traditional engineering concept evaluation tools, questions that relate the drug store and legal cases to these tools are introduced.

[Description and screenshot taken from the wiki page for this module. Materials are used under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.]

Link: http://deseng.ryerson.ca/xiki/Dcl/Main:Concept_evaluation
Author: D. J. Caswell; R. Fauvel; C. Johnston
Publication Date: 2004-10
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Rights: Copyright 2011 Canadian Design Engineering Network, content on this site is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.