Background
Because design is recognized as a critical element of engineering thinking, it is crucial for educators to utilize the most effective methods to teach engineering problem solving. Results from this study of students' thinking process may shape future teaching methods.
Purpose
This article explores the differences in design processes between high school engineering students and expert engineers. It also examines the differences between high school freshmen who have taken one engineering course and seniors who have taken a series of engineering courses.
Design/Method
Fifty‐nine high school students from four states were asked to think aloud in a three‐hour design task that was audio and video recorded. Verbal reports from the audio and video became source data for protocol analysis. Results from previous studies provided expert design performance data for comparisons.
Results
Students and experts alike spent a large portion of their time modeling. Students spent significantly less time in the process of information gathering than experts. Freshmen spent significantly less time in the idea generation process than seniors and experts. Freshmen and seniors spent significantly less time determining the feasibility of their ideas, evaluating alternative ideas, and decision making than experts.
Conclusions
High school students engage in design thinking with little understanding of the problem from the client's perspective. Students tend to become fixated on a single solution rather than comparing alternatives. By encouraging development of alternative solutions, K‐12 engineering education could foster opportunities to critically evaluate students' design solutions.
Evident in the observations was the theme of student transition from teacher driven problems with narrow boundaries, to student driven problem definition with wide boundaries. In this research, projects started as small individual activities early in the fall term. As the semester progressed, projects became more complex, and a necessity for teamwork emerged. Each activity in the fall provided students with experience and skills in areas of engineering design and material fabrication. This preparation provided a conceptual and practical foundation for the open-ended spring design challenge.
Soft robotics is an emerging field with strong potential to serve as an educational tool due to its advantages such as low costs and shallow learning curves. In this paper, we introduce a modular and reconfigurable mold for flexible design of pneumatic soft robotic grippers. By using simple assembly kits, students at all levels are able to design and construct soft robotic grippers that vary in function and performance. The process of constructing the modular mold enables students to understand how design choices impact system performance. Our unique modular mold allows students to select the number and length of fingers in a gripper, as well as to adjust the internal geometry of the pneumatic actuator cavity, which dictates how and where bending of a finger occurs. In addition, the mold may be deconstructed and reconfigured, which allows for fast iterative design and lowers material costs (since a new mold does not need to be made to implement a design change). We further demonstrate the feasibility of the modular mold by implementing it in a soft robot design activity in classrooms and showing a sufficiently high rate of student success in designing and constructing a functional soft robotic gripper.
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