Session F1G THE TECHNICAL, PROCESS, AND BUSINESS CONSIDERATIONS FOR ENGINEERING DESIGN Len Polizzotto1 and William R. Michalson2 Abstract The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has added a new course, titled ECE Design, EE 2799. This course focuses on teaching students the process steps associated with designing new products, as well as the business implications of the decisions they make. During the course students not only learn about the business of engineering, but they also must apply the concepts of the class to the design and implementation of a working product prototype. As a consequence of the teaching approach, the course explicitly requires students to utilize material learned in other courses in order to successfully complete their project. By offering this course early in the Sophomore year, students are able to clearly see the relationships between courses and can identify and correct deficiencies in their academic background. In addition, the fundamentals learned prepare the students to tackle their Senior Major Qualifying Project (MQP), thus enhancing their Capstone Design experience.
level engineer might encounter in industry and, in fact, are often sponsored by companies. It is through this MQP that most students gain their Capstone Design experience. Since the MQP is such an important part of the educational process at WPI, it is important to periodically assess the quality of the completed projects [1]. This assessment involves a regular peer review of the project reports and the production of a detailed analysis of the results of the peer review. Quality control is affected by reporting these results to the Department faculty along with recommendations. Although the vast majority of projects were clearly satisfying the educational goals of the Department, as a consequence of these reviews, we noticed that there were some disturbing issues that were beginning to emerge. •
Index Terms analysis, business, design, synthesis.
INTRODUCTION
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One of the distinguishing features of undergraduate education at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is the series of projects that all students must complete to receive their degree. These projects consist of a Sufficiency, which is equivalent to a six course, in-depth study into some aspect of the humanities; an Interactive Qualifying Project, or IQP, which is equivalent to a three course sequence focused on the relationship between technology and society; and a Major Qualifying Project, or MQP, which is equivalent to a three course sequence focused on the student’s major field of study. The course described in this paper was designed to address concerns that were identified during the periodic assessment of the quality of MQPs completed within the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. To assist the reader in understanding the nature of our concerns, it is useful to provide a brief outline of a Major Qualifying Project. This project, which forms an essential part of the educational experience of our students, is intended to provide students an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to apply the skills they have acquired in their studies to the solution of an engineering problem. These projects typically span nearly a full academic year, and consume approximately 20 hours per week per student. Projects are similar in scope to the type of problem an entry-
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Poor design synthesis – many students were attempting to solve problems by finding a solution first and then “force-fitting” the solution to the problem rather than analyzing the problem and identifying appropriate solutions. In many projects, little attention was paid to issues such as quality, safety, reliability and maintainability. Similarly, little attention was being paid to issues associated with economics and aesthetics. Project advisors were noticing that an increased number of students were having difficulty understanding how different areas of Electrical Engineering related to each other, and to other non-Electrical Engineering coursework. Although these students were typically Seniors, some had serious deficiencies in their knowledge of the fundamentals of Electrical Engineering. A significant amount of faculty time was being spent teaching project teams the fundamentals of design. Since each member of the faculty advises 2-3 project teams, this resulted in a tremendous amount of duplicated faculty effort.
Upon analysis, it became clear that the solution to these problems required modifications to the undergraduate curriculum well before the Senior year. Further, it was proposed that, at a minimum, there was a need for a class that most students would take to learn the fundamentals of design. Given the potential ramifications of adding such a course to an already crowded curriculum, a committee was formed to fully study these observations and make
Len Polizzotto, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Worcester, MA 01609
[email protected] William R. Michalson, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Worcester, MA 01609
[email protected]
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Session F1G COURSE STRUCTURE
recommendations for modifying the curriculum that would address all of these concerns.
GOALS FOR A NEW COURSE At the same time the concept for a course in ECE Design was being formed, there were several additional changes being made to the ECE curriculum. One significant change was a reorganization of our first and second year courses into a set of core courses that covered material the Department faculty believed every ECE student should know, and a set of advanced core that was still Sophomorelevel, but which provided more depth coverage of selected topics. The ECE Design course was developed as one of the new advanced core courses. The ECE Design course was formed with two primary goals in mind. First, the course must demonstrate the relevance of earlier course work to the students by providing them an opportunity to apply that knowledge to solving a problem, and second, the course must teach the students how to decompose a complex problem into a series of manageable steps. With these primary goals in mind, we conceived of an ECE Design course that would: • •
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Require students to apply material from their core ECE courses; Require material from at least one advanced core course (since the core sequence requires 4 out of 5 available slots in a typical student’s schedule, we could only assume they would have one advanced core course prior to EE2799); Have a project where the students would have to apply top-down design to solving an incompletely specified problem; Require working effectively as a team, since not every student would have all of the necessary background to successfully complete the project; Require students to apply common sense, as well as a knowledge of physics, mathematics, mechanics, and other topics to the project; Directly address the business aspects of engineering design including scheduling, team management, budgeting, developing customer requirements, and predicting return on investment; Directly address ethical and legal issues; Directly address manufacturing, safety, reliability and other engineering issues.
Given the large expected enrollment, and the need to accommodate variations in student schedules we decided to offer the course twice a year. The first offering, which the typical student would take, occurs in the second half of the Sophomore year. An additional offering is available in the middle of the Junior year. This allows transfer students, and students missing prerequisites or students requiring remedial action to take the course early enough to still derive maximum benefit.
The ECE Design course has three main components: a one hour lecture held four times per week, a supervised three hour laboratory session held once per week, and unsupervis ed open laboratory access. Unlike a typical Electrical Engineering course, the lectures contain rather little technical content, instead focusing on explaining the process of engineering design. The supervised laboratory is a hybrid of technical and non-technical issues, while the unsupervised laboratory is primarily technical. Team Teaching and Guest Speakers One novel concept in the implementation of the ECE Design course is the introduction of team teaching. Since design projects are typically team activities, we feel that it is important to demonstrate team skills at all levels in the course, including the delivery of lectures and the guidance of laboratory activities. Thus, there are always two or more faculty members that are assigned to each offering of the course. On any given day, one faculty member is the primary lecturer for the class, however all faculty attend the lectures and are there to encourage questions and debate. In addition, there are typically three or four lectures that are delivered by guest speakers. These speakers are chosen based on their expertise in particular areas (such as Industrial Design, Management, Marketing, Law, etc.) In this way students see team dynamics at work since they can see how different people with different areas of expertise can work efficiently together. Syllabus The syllabus for the course begins by introducing the basic concepts associated with top-down design during the first week. This is essential, since in order for students to complete a significant project within a single 7-week term, they must be shown the basics of problem decomposition in the first few days of class. A typical syllabus is as follows: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Problem definition and decomposition Market research Customer requirements Product requirements Competition Brainstorming solutions The Value Matrix Presentations and report preparation Project management - time line/budget/ROI How to estimate ROI Corporate finance (guest lecture) Schedule / Quality / Cost tradeoffs Organizational Interfaces (guest lecture) ECE Design options and tradeoffs EE interfaces and tradeoffs
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Session F1G • • • • • • • • • •
I/O Specifications Software / Firmware / Hardware Design for manufacturability (guest lecture) Freezing the design The prototype and design analysis Manufacturing scale-up Quality and reliability Engineering Ethics Standards, regulatory, and liability issues Intellectual Property (guest lecture)
Once the basics of problem decomposition are covered, other topics relevant to the design process are discussed in increasing amounts of detail. Weekly homework assignments are used to ensure that each project group is making sufficient progress towards completing their project and to make sure that no project groups are going astray. These homework assignments essentially form a series of milestones that guide the students through the course. Course Projects The centerpiece of the ECE Design course is a project that the students must complete during the seven weeks of the course. Determining good projects is a significant challenge, since the majority of students have only a Sophomore-level background in Electrical Engineering. When devising projects, it is desirable that they have the following characteristics. •
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The project must be solvable using analog circuitry or digital circuitry (or a hybrid). The students must do the tradeoffs needed to determine what method of implementation is optimal based on their analysis. The project must require some type of sensor and must display a result. The project will ideally require addressing both electrical and mechanical issues. The project must require applying a knowledge of mathematics and physics.
There are many different types of projects that are suitable for the course. At the time of this writing, we have offered the following projects: • • • • • • • •
an electronic torque wrench, an electronic barometric altimeter, an electronic kitchen scale, a device for measuring jump height, a self-leveling balance beam, a pedometer, a temperature-sensitive variable speed fan, an electronically actuated mousetrap.
At the time of the first lecture, the students are given their project and team assignments. An example of the type of project statement the students are given is:
“Design and construct an electronic torque wrench. The wrench must be able to display torque in units of foot-pounds or Newton-meters, and be able to cover a range of torques that is similar to mechanical torque wrenches having a retail selling price less than $100. The wrench must have a read out or display to indicate torque. The design must be easily integrated into existing mechanical torque wrench designs and should add no more than $50 to the retail price of the comparable mechanical torque wrench.” Each of the faculty assigned to the course is the leader of a group of 6 to 10 project teams that are all working on the same project. Each project team consists of three students. Thus each faculty member is typically responsible for guiding between 18 and 30 students through the design of a single project. Different instructors are assigned different projects, and they primarily work with students doing that project. Instructors, however, are prepared to answer student questions about any of the projects. In fact, it is common for instructors to swap homework assignments, grading the work of students from a different project group than the one they are responsible for. In this way, problems associated with being under distanced from the student’s work are reduced, making it easier to work with students to improve the quality of their work. Project Team Assignment Successfully completing this type of project within 7 weeks requires that each project team to have, in aggregate, a complete set of basic Electrical Engineering skills. Thus, team selection becomes an important issue. Since students tend to choose teammates based on friendship, allowing the students to select their own project teams can result in project teams without adequate breadth of background. Therefore, the instructors assign students to project teams and assign project teams to projects. The teams are selected by using student records to determine the core and advanced core classes completed by each student. This information is sorted, and subsets are formed such that each project team possesses, in aggregate, all of the background necessary to successfully complete the project. Thus, students are grouped based on their backgrounds such that they bring complementary skills to the team. An additional benefit of this approach is that by picking the teams and projects the students are placed in an unfamiliar situation. This requires them to confront and resolve issues associated with team dynamics quickly, just as they would in an industrial setting. Of course, the instructors are available when necessary to assist teams in resolving conflicts between members. Laboratory
The class lectures focus on the design process steps, while the laboratory time focuses on the individual designs, 0-7803-6669-7/01/$10.00 © 2001 IEEE October 10 - 13, 2001 Reno, NV 31 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference F1G-21
Session F1G ordering parts, and building working units. Since all of the students will have completed the academic core courses, they all will be familiar with general laboratory procedures, the use of test equipment, and basic prototyping techniques. The main difference in this case is that unlike a typical engineering laboratory, to complete their projects the student teams are required to define the parts that they need, order the parts through our ECE department shop, build their electrical design, and then integrate it into a mechanical structure. These topics make the laboratory experience in this course a tremendous challenge. To assist students in learning how to perform the required tasks, the laboratory occurs in two parts: a supervised three-hour mentoring session, and an unsupervised open laboratory. The first portion of the laboratory is the three-hour session that is scheduled once a week. In this session the students and instructor associated with a single problem all meet in a single lecture room to discuss various aspects of the project and the status of the individual project teams. In the first weeks of class, this time is usually spent guiding the students through brainstorming sessions and answering general technical questions. As the students progress, this time is used for answering general questions and to allow the instructor to meet individually with each project team. As the students continue to make progress, the session is used to provide the students opportunities for making status presentations. By incorporating such presentations into the laboratory, the students are able to make several presentations and hone their presentation skills prior to their final presentation. Most of the actual implementation and test is done using unsupervised open laboratory time. Within the ECE Department there are several laboratory areas that are dedicated to student project work. Students are free to use these facilities anytime they are open. In addition, the Department has a shop facility that is staffed during business hours by trained technicians. In this shop, students have access to the facilities and personnel who can assist with fabrication. The shop also stocks a wide variety of electronic and mechanical components, and has mechanisms for ordering components. CEO Presentations Once the students have completed their project, they must write a formal report and make a formal presentation. In order to add realism to the project experience the final presentation is given to an invited guest who plays the role of a CEO (some of the guests are, in fact, CEOs of high-tech companies). Each project team is given 15 minutes to present their project. This presentation must cover the highlights of both the business and technical aspects of the project, and must include a project demonstration. Following the presentation the CEO is allowed to question the project team. Given the
relatively large enrollment, it is impossible to have a single session for all presentations, so the project teams are randomly assigned to presentation sessions that are run concurrently.
COURSE IMPLEMENTATION The first day of class is somewhat shocking to the students. The initial shock occurs when the students realize that a team of two or more faculty teaches the course. A second shock occurs when, rather than maintaining a typical lecture format and student-teacher relationship, we tell them that they now work for our company and that we, the instructors, are really their supervisors. Similar to life in a corporate setting, we tell the students what project they will work on and who will be in their project team. This is a significant departure from what they are used to, since in most courses they can select both their project and their partners. Each team does the homework assignments, one assignment per week, the project, and the final project presentation, as a group. These activities are worth half the class grade. Three exams are given which the students take individually and are worth the other half of the grade. In order to pass the course, students must pass each half. This ensures that each student can individually demonstrate knowledge of the lecture material and can work within a team. The lectures are intended to give the students the tools necessary to develop a successful product. By successful, we mean commercial success. Since most products fail not because of technical problems, but due to their not satisfying customer needs, we start out with how to survey potential customers to determine their needs. The students are taught how to identify target customers and conduct market research. From this research, done typically with surveys, they are shown how to convert the data into a customer requirement, a statement of what the customers really would like to have. They are then taught how to convert this customer requirement into a product requirement, a statement of what the product needs to do in order to satisfy what the customer wants. Finally, the students are instructed on how to develop a product specification, a detailed description of how the product will perform. The concepts presented in lecture are reinforced using homework assignments in which the students must apply the lecture material to their assigned project. For example, their first homework assignment is the development of a product specification for their project. The next lecture discusses how to brainstorm ways to make a product do what the specification calls for, namely the design concept. The students are taught how to develop several alternatives and how to evaluate the alternatives in order to select the best solution. It is at this point they are introduced to how to determine who the competition is and how to evaluate these competitive offerings. The selection of their best design concept option depends heavily on
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Session F1G whether it will beat the competition. We have developed a Value Analysis spreadsheet that allows identifying customer needs, and then evaluating the competition and comparing the competition to the students proposed solution. Using this spreadsheet to objectively evaluate design options is the subject of homework two. Once a design concept is established, we teach the class how to break the problem into manageable components and how each of these components can be done independently and in parallel, as long as the input and output requirements of each component is identified. This is the task for homework three, including the identification of who on each team will be responsible for what portions of the design. In order to define when each member of the team must deliver their part, the students are taught how to develop project time lines and the associated critical path. We show how each design component can be further broken down into its detailed tasks and the time requirements for each scheduled. One of the concepts we introduce is that there are three fundamental aspects to a project. They are schedule, quality, and cost. Schedule is obviously when the project will be completed. Here, they have no choice if they want to pass the course. Quality refers to the features and characteristics of the end result. Cost is how much effort needs to be expended to complete the task. Typically, at least one of these three must be compromised. In our case, the features originally set out to achieve are reduced, and the cost, namely the amount of time the students spent on the project, is significantly increased. Other aspects of design that we teach are design for manufacturability and design for test. The class is shown that it is not sufficient to simply make something work. They must prove that it can be cost effectively manufactured. And, they must show that the product can be tested for not only overall quality and reliability, but to be able to debug the product if it fails to function. Defining these other design criteria is the topic for homework four. Next, we give the students a brief background on financial analysis and how to determine the return on investment, profit, etc., of their product. To do this, they are shown how to make estimates of sales volumes, how to estimate development expenses, and how much return in necessary to make the effort worth doing. Applying this analysis to their project is the task for homework five. The final part of the lectures deals with the legal and ethical aspects of product design and development. The legal considerations include protecting proprietary technology developed, making sure that a design does not violate some other entity’s proprietary technology, and the liability aspects of what happens when a product fails to perform or worse, what if it causes injury to the user. The ethics associated with a design are discussed, as well as ethical standards an engineer should abide by. The project teams are required to review these topics and how they relate to their design in homework six.
ASSESSMENT During the time that the ECE Design course was conceived, the Department was working on assessment mechanisms for all of our courses. Given the goals of the ECE design course, and its relation to various ABET criteria, it was important to include this course in these early assessment efforts. To this end, we invited the person responsible for conducting assessment-related surveys to give both entrance and exit surveys to our most recent offering of EE2799. This survey listed many areas of competence in which the students were asked to rate their ability on a scale from 0 to 10 (0 representing no ability and 10 representing perfect ability). The table below shows the students’ assessment of their abilities in various areas related to the topics contained in EE2799. The column labeled “before” contains the results of the entrance survey and the “after” column rates the same abilities after completing the course. In reviewing the table it is obvious that many important messages are being communicated to our students. Ability Develop Specifications Synthesize a design Implement a design Verify the adequacy of a design relative to its specifications Perform tradeoffs between schedule, quality and budget Determine a design’s reliability Determine a design’s manufacturability Assess a design’s marketing position Know what intellectual property is Understand safety considerations
Before 5.00 5.18 5.36 4.52
After 7.57 8.00 8.27 8.20
4.48
8.04
4.00 3.76
7.71 7.40
4.03
7.20
4.15 4.82
7.52 7.63
CONCLUSIONS At the time of this writing the ECE Design course described in this paper is in its third offering. To date, the student response has been nothing short of extraordinary – the students see the material as being highly relevant, and are generally willing to invest a tremendous amount of time into their projects. A comparison of entry and exit surveys seems to indicate that students leave the course with a much better understanding of the engineering design process. It will be another year before the first students to take the course will begin their Senior MQPs, so it is still too early to determine if the ECE Design course will have all of the desired positive impacts. However, early evidence seems to indicate that students continue to value the lessons learned in the design course, and many indicate that their
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Session F1G work in other classes has improved as a consequence of the design course. Future surveys and analysis will ultimately be used to determine the specific impact of the course.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the work of Professor Denise Nicoletti for the quality of her surveys and her tireless efforts to obtain 100% response from the students. Special thanks are also given to technicians Gary Adamowicz and Tom Angelotti who consistently provide expert assistance to the students passing through this course.
REFERENCES [1]
Michalson, W. R. and Labonté, R. L., "Capstone Design in the ECE Curriculum: Assessing the Quality of Undergraduate Projects at WPI," American Society of Engineering Educators 1996 Annual Conference (CD-ROM), session 1232 Washington, D.C., June, 1996.
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