Towards a Framework to Support Engineering Design Student Projects

The first research question of this thesis addresses the problem of information management in engineering design projects. The students' design deliberations, as externalized in their discussion threads and through the documents they create or reference, can be visualized by mining the textual evidence they produce as natural part of their collaboration process. By using computational linguistic techniques and machine learning, all the documents and student discussion threads are aggregated, and a sample concept-map based graphical representation is created that can be used to navigate the project corpus. This approach is referred to as DesignWebs. DesignWebs can be viewed as an assemblage of related noun phrases reveal the current state of the project and the underlying structure of the design. DesignWebs assist as navigation aids in contextualizing and viewing project archives by structuring the design information as graphs of related entities.;The second research question presents noun phrases as a surrogate measure for design team dynamics. This question builds on prior research about using noun phrases as objective measure for measuring design team performance (Mabogunje 1997), and uses them for exploring how the design vocabulary of student teams expands and contracts during a design project. The expansion and contraction reflect the students brainstorming about different design alternatives for the project and finalizing certain design solutions respectively. This question also shows that tracking the noun phrases as they are introduced by one team and shared across team boundaries can reveal insights about whether the teams are successfully collaborating. Tracking the design vocabulary over time shows how the design vocabulary related to a team's assigned tasks keeps on getting refined as the project progresses, reflecting the domain expertise gained by the team. The shared vocabulary between teams also mirrors the project's work-flow, as it is represented in the artifact's system architecture diagram. Finally this question shows how instructors can see the changes in a team's design knowledge by monitoring its DesignWebs, as they are created at different milestones during the project. The third research question presents DesignWebs as a research framework that facilitates the validation of prior research findings about the functioning and assessment of design project teams by obviating the tedious data pre-processing steps. Three diverse research studies are examined to demonstrate the wide applicability of DesignWebs as a platform: the first examines whether using the semantic coherence of student communications in team-based project courses can act as an indicator of the progress of the design process (Song et al. 2003); the second examines whether applying metrics on the "communication artifacts" generated by computer supported collaborative tools can provide insights into the design process that created them (Dutoit 1996); the third explores various individual and group work processes that when made more explicit to instructors can assist them in carrying out the assessment processes (Gweon 2008).;This research contributes to supporting engineering design student projects by presenting a framework that organizes and evaluates a variety of potential metrics and design assessment measures based on the text products in a given project corpus. It also presents an interface that summarizes the team's online communications and documentation to track the emergence of the shared solution and extent of team collaboration, using noun phrases as a surrogate measure. Finally, this research presents a research test bed that brings together a number of research hypotheses related to collaborative design projects by demonstrating that they can complement the instructors' understanding of how teams are working. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).