This paper details a mechanical engineering course in toy design developed at the Milwaukee School of Engineering (Milwaukee, WI, USA). The course was motivated by the need to develop design experiences that integrate societal constraints, as well as the desire to integrate concepts from general education coursework into the engineering curriculum. In this team-taught course, students learn concepts from the area of child developmental psychology, and then use these concepts to inform their design efforts in the design and development of a toy or game to meet specific developmental needs of a specific age group. Student teams take the project from concept to prototype, then play-test their toys and games with children. This paper covers the background and motivation for the course, the topical coverage in both the psychology and engineering areas required for successful implementation, and project descriptions from a recent implementation of the course. Advice for those who wish to develop a similar offering, based on both instructor and student feedback, will be summarized.
I am associate professor and chair of the Humanities, Social Science, and Communication department at MSOE. I am also the IRB Director at MSOE. My background is in Developmental Psychology and I am also interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Engineering students are educated in formal design methodologies to aid in the decision-making processes involved in the creation of new products and systems. These formal methodologies make use of such design tools as decision matrices to aid engineering teams in the evaluation and selection of a design solution from the various alternatives considered for development.The Decoy Effect (or Asymmetrically Dominated Alternative Effect), is a well-studied phenomenon that affects decision-making. In essence, it describes the experimentally-verified effect that occurs when an inferior choice is introduced to the available alternatives. This inferior choice is said to be "dominated" by one of the original alternatives, which then prompts individuals to choose the dominating alternative 1,2 . The effect of this so-called "decoy" choice often leads the decision-maker to the selection of a suboptimal alternative.The decoy effect has been shown to adversely affect decision-making capabilities involving consumer product purchases, gambling, and job offers 3,4,5 . While the impact of this effect would certainly extend to decision-making among technical professionals, there has been little attempt to address the impact on the decision-making process used by engineers in design. This paper introduces the decoy effect and describes the implications it can have on the engineering design process. Initial small-scale experiments to validate and quantify the effect as it relates to engineering design will be described. Development and modification of design tools to mitigate the impact of the decoy effect in the engineering design process will be described.
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