Design Mastery: Understanding High Achieving Engineering Students’ Design Processes Through Eye Tracking
Open Access
Author:
Miller, Colin
Area of Honors:
Mechanical Engineering
Degree:
Bachelor of Science
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Catherine G P Berdanier, Thesis Supervisor Jacqueline Antonia O'Connor, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Engineering Education Design
Abstract:
Engineering design is an essential aspect of the undergraduate engineering curriculum. To continually improve the ways that we understand and teach the design process, researchers often study the patterns of expert designers. In this context, I studied the design self-efficacy and design patterns of high achieving senior level mechanical engineering students. I developed an authentic design challenge specifically tailored to undergraduate engineering students and collected data using eye tracking methods. A new method of data visualization was developed specifically for this eye tracking dataset that focused on visualizing CAD-based 3D modeling processes. My visualization tool merges an area of interest timeline with cognitive workload to represent design process patterns. After analyzing data on N=10 participants, I noticed trends that indicated that high achieving students often employ a truncated version of the traditional design process. While a few participants generated productive designs, based on my twelve parameters, most of the participants failed to demonstrate mastery of the design process. As such, I concluded that current teaching methods may not be adequate in educating students to generate meaningful solutions in authentic design challenges.
