Teaching design methodology to undergraduates through multi-year projects

This paper presents a new approach for teaching engineering design methodology that consists of covering different steps of the design process in four semesters focusing on a specific problem. During the first semester students are introduced to the overall design methodology and are asked to identify the needs, tasks and outputs, based on a given problem statement. During the second semester students are asked to come up with a conceptual design and modify the inputs, tasks and outputs. During the third semester students are asked to come up with a working preliminary design solution and obtain some output data. And during the fourth semester students are asked to modify their design, based on their results from the previous semesters and the problem requirements, and come up with the final detailed design. Each part requires a separate report, with the results from the first three being referenced in the final report. At this time due to several considerations, including limited resources, we are only targeting engineering honors students and using robotics related problems for the multi-year design projects. The four-semester long project will be the "honors option" for the courses that engineering honor students must take during the first two years at our campus. A detailed description of this approach, including advantages and disadvantages, future directions and recommendations, are included.