| There has been a great effort in recent years to effect a significant change in engineering education. This reform movement has had may objectives and proponents. Herein it has been postulated and shown that properly formulated design activities can fulfill a great many of the reform objectives. Furthermore, it was hypothesized that it was possible to design a methodology for creating such activities in order to facilitate their implementation. The crux of the Engineering by Design methodology is a framework for collaboration of engineers and educators which combines their various areas of expertise to create lessons which are both technically accurate and educationally sound.; This design methodology was first developed by analyzing the process used to design an activity for use in the Civil Engineering component of the University of Florida's Introduction to Engineering class. After the methodology was formally established, the methodology was used in collaboration with a University of Florida professor to design an activity to teach the concept of tributary area. To evaluate the methodology, a posttest was administered and feedback from the students was obtained. The posttest scores were very high (average 18 out of 21), which indicated excellent mastery but lacked sufficient range to conduct any correlational studies. Quantitative analysis of student feedback was conducted, indicating positive results.; A second application of the methodology was conducted to design a lesson to teach descriptive statistics to a high school physics class. Constraints on this design caused the lesson generated using Engineering by Design to be very similar to the session used to teach the control group. As a result, the posttest indicated only a slight increase in the performance of the experimental group. |
