Engineering Design Experiences While Designing Engineering Curricula

It’s been often repeated that necessity is the mother of invention. But sometimes, solutions to needs nobody realizes even exist present themselves unbidden.

That’s what happened at Rice University in the early 2010s. For decades, the campus had prepared student meals in a single, enormous facility to distribute to various food halls. When they decided to move to a more distributed meal preparation system, it left an industrial-sized building vacant.

And Sallie Keller-McNulty, dean of the engineering school at the time, knew exactly what to do with it. She pounced on the opportunity to create a makerspace where senior design teams could work on a wide variety of projects alongside one another. Shared across departments and disciplines, it became an interdisciplinary haven for design work.

But Ann Saterbak, who had been teaching team project classes at the school since 1999, still felt like something was missing, and it didn’t take long for her to realize what it was.

“It seemed like a natural thing to me to have first-year students working in the space, too,” Saterbak said. “Their identity development as engineers was being farmed out to other departments through chemistry, physics, math and programming classes. I strongly believed we needed to be teaching engineering design courses in that first year.”

Looking around the country and her education network, Saterbak created a first-year design engineering course with an eye toward what she believed to be exemplary programs, such as those at Northwestern University and Harvey Mudd College. After piloting the program for a couple of years and working out some kinks related to team size, project scope and working with clients, she built a strong program aimed at improving student retention and self-efficacy.

And then Duke Engineering convinced her to do it in Durham. Hired as a professor of the practice of biomedical engineering in 2017, Saterbak wasted no time testing the waters at Duke. She quickly sought out partnerships with community organizations, located resources to create a makerspace and launched a pilot program with 60 students. It only took a year for the program to expand into a larger space and enroll the entire first-year class of about 400 students.

“Students are learning the engineering design process,” Saterbak said. “What steps make sense, the importance of iteration, how testing informs redesign—those sorts of skills.”

It’s an idea that Harvey Mudd College jumped on perhaps before anybody else in the growing engineering design movement. The name most associated with Harvey Mudd’s forward-thinking design curriculum is Clive Dym, who joined the school in 1991 as the inaugural holder of the Fletcher Jones Design Chair. Dym believed design was the distinguishing activity of the engineer, and that it did not require a foundation in the classical sciences such as chemistry, math and physics beforehand.

“Clive knew you could teach students design as a process early in their careers, and that it could be highly motivational for them,” said Gordon Krauss, the current Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design at Harvey Mudd. “They may not know how to calculate the strength of a beam or know how a material will behave, but when they come across those topics later in the curriculum, they think, ‘Wow, this ties back into all that knowledge I’d wished I’d had back when I was working on that project.’”

According to Krauss, Harvey Mudd’s early team project-based engineering courses contribute to the low attrition within the department, though he suspects such interventions are more impactful at larger programs that traditionally have had higher rates. They’ll even sometimes attract students from other members of The Claremont Colleges of which they are a part of. (Though majoring at HMC in engineering for such students has proved challenging).

That’s a sentiment that Saterbak can relate to. After instituting its First-Year Design program, the retention rates over the first four semesters increased by more than five percent, with underrepresented groups showing even higher retention. Students also self-reported a greater belief in themselves in the areas of engineering design and tinkering.

“There’s still a belief in many programs that if 100 students come in, you’re supposed to weed 50 of them out by graduation,” Krauss said. “That’s something I strongly disagree with. I think instead of weeding people out who can’t do it, what we’re actually doing is demotivating them. Just think of everything those students could contribute.”

Part of the motivation in having these types of design experiences early in an educational career is likely tied to students actually being able to see themselves growing into an engineering role that appeals to them. And to be able to do that, Saterbak notes, programs need to provide a variety of projects.

To accomplish this, Saterbak and her colleagues have spent years building relationships with a wide range of partners over the past seven years. They work with partners within Duke such as the Lemur Center and the libraries. They have several ongoing clients through local zoos and gardens, which often present a wide range of challenges for students to think through.

But perhaps their most fruitful colleagues in terms of sourcing projects come in the form of the Duke University School of Medicine and local organizations serving people with disabilities. Human health is a never-ending maze of options that work for some people but not others, while differently abled people often present truly unique challenges.

This is an approach used by Northwestern University as well.

“Health care providers often present a very rich source of people with high needs but not many commercial options to meet them,” said Alex Birdwell, co-director of Northwestern’s Design Thinking and Communication program. “While their specific problems might be uncommon, that one person has a huge opportunity to benefit from a student-created solution. And these interactions build empathy in students, who see the challenges first hand and also get to see the benefits of what they built first hand.”

Even with a steady stream of projects being provided by consistent partners like the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab rehabilitation hospital and other Chicagoland health care organizations, sourcing enough projects is a challenge for Birdwell and his colleagues. Each of Northwestern’s 500 first-year engineering students take the Design Thinking and Communication course—twice.

With 65-70 course sections taking place each year, Birdwell’s team needs to source 60-70 projects from the community each year. And it has to deal with the problems of real people; real people who are willing to meet with students a few times during the course of the project.

Given how much teams need to work with one another and interact with their clients and the faculty, Northwestern also integrates a communications aspect. That makes sense, given that its Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications is widely regarded as one of the best in the nation.

“That’s one aspect of our design program that is somewhat unique, that we have two instructors in the classroom, one from engineering design and one from the Cook Family Writing Program, who weave their instruction together,” said Birdwell. “But effective engineering requires effective communication, so we teach sharing information in multiple formats like speaking, graphical communications, making slides, giving presentations, designing posters. And it counts as a required English credit.”

Northwestern’s program, which began in the mid-90s as a pilot, has grown to encompass about 50 faculty members each term, split about 50/50 between engineering and communications. It is, as Birdwell put it, a rather large machine that requires a lot of people to make happen.

“It’s definitely a lot of work to rescope 50 to 60 new projects every year,” Saterbak echoed.

That time requirement is one of the reasons many engineering schools struggle to also provide design-focused projects through the middle of their curriculum. At Duke, efforts are being made to get sophomores and juniors into such projects through programs such as the Biomedical Engineering Design Fellows. There, each student designs, constructs and demonstrates a functional medical instrument based on a clinical need identified by a Duke University Medical Center clinician. Their devices are also tested and iterated on while students learn about the FDA medical device clearance process.

But programs such as these come with a cost, which is perhaps why implementing them can be such a challenge.

“When we add content or educational experience to a course or curriculum, it will typically displace some other important subject matter,” said Krauss. “We strongly believe that incorporating design in the student experience enhances the ability to apply the engineering sciences and modeling course content.”

According to Krauss, many previously believed that teaching design independently of other courses was appropriate with the expectation that students will seamlessly integrate all these aspects. In his experience, moving from understanding content to incorporating it in the design process is a big leap for many students, and they benefit from practicing design related applications. 

It’s an integration that many students eventually have to make regardless of how much practice they’ve had with the design process, as senior design capstone projects have long been a staple at many engineering schools. But as with emerging first-year design programs, there can be large differences between how different programs approach them.

At Harvey Mudd, for example, the “senior” design project actually encompasses three semesters, stretching back into the junior year. And rather than in the sunny confines of southern California, students are typically sent out to partners in industry and non-profit organizations. For example, one recent project saw students flying out to Malaysia to work on a windmill project. As with Northwestern’s first-year program, this requires a lot of effort to source projects and find companies willing to sponsor them.

“Our students’ tuition isn’t funding these sorts of trips any more than other schools’ tuitions are, so these have to be self-sustaining,” Krauss said. “It’s critical that we have a group that goes out and recruits projects by helping to make contact with industry partners who want to participate.”

Krauss also stressed that this level of effort is not the only way to get students professional practice experience. Many schools rely on internships or co-ops during the school year to fill this role. But he also pointed out that internships can have all kinds of experiences, ranging from the opportunity to work on a long-term design project to having offices scramble to find a task for them each day.

At Duke, working with industry partners for senior design projects is not the norm, but it is a growing trend. One example can be found in the classroom of Rabih Younes, assistant professor of the practice of electrical and computer engineering.

Since 2020, Younes has brought in a handful of projects from Garmin International, which “brings GPS navigation and wearable technology to the automotive, aviation, marine, outdoor and fitness markets,” and also has offices about 30 miles from Duke’s campus. Each year, Garmin brings in a couple of open-ended ideas for projects that students could pursue, or students are also welcome to suggest their own ideas.

“Because the supporting team from Garmin understands the technicalities of what the students work on, besides the usual client meetings, students also meet virtually with them every other week to receive technical support on their hardware and software systems,” Younes said. “They’re great at supporting our teams throughout the semester.”

As one might expect, many students jump at the opportunity to work with professional engineers and designers. Last year, four out of the five teams in the class wanted to work with them, so Younes and the Garmin team had to go through a proposal round.

But even if students don’t work with Garmin, there are still plenty of other exciting projects to work on. One recent example was an ankle bracelet to provide gait feedback to Parkinson’s patients in a local physical therapy practice. Whatever the project, students practice designing and engineering a whole system that requires skills in hardware, software, human-computer interaction, 3D printing, prototyping and agile project management.

“No matter the client, it’s a good experience for the students,” Younes said. “They have to work through issues of misunderstandings and working with clients who don’t know which instructions are easy to accomplish and which are impossible. But at the end of the class, they get very good at communicating with their peers and the clients.”

And those misunderstandings and life lessons are crucial, because learning to design, to engineer, always requires failure. Founding faculty members of Harvey Mudd’s Clinic Program, Jack Alford and M. Mack Gilkeson, thought the best way to expose students to such challenges was to give students a “clinical” experience similar to that which medical students receive.

“I gained the idea that engineering was like dancing,” said Gilkeson during an interview about the history of Harvey Mudd’s Clinic Program. “You don’t learn it in a darkened lecture hall watching slides; you learn it by getting out on the dance floor and having your toes stepped on.”