Converging-diverging design strategies in a sophomore level design sequence: Review of an electromechanical project

At our university Sophomore Clinics I and II are part of an eight-semester design sequence in which students progress from basic data collection and reverse engineering projects through more open-ended, industry-sponsored capstone design experiences. The team of multidisciplinary faculty from Engineering and Communications who teach the sophomore level courses have observed the difficulty students have tackling the fundamental open-ended nature of true design problems and have subsequently revised the sequence. For the Fall of 2005 the Sophomore Clinic sequence was revised to introduce Dym et al. 's converging-diverging framework for design by incorporating a series of three projects of increasing complexity with accompany activities designed to reinforce the converging-diverging concepts. For the third project in the series, roughly sixty students participated in an open-ended electromechanical design project that included lectures and activities to reinforce the design framework, assessment of the retention/comprehension of the framework's concepts, and a final design competition. While assessment data was unable to show a correlation between comprehension of the design framework and improvements in students' designs, results do show that students had adequate retention/comprehension of the converging-diverging philosophy and that students' designs performed better in the competition following the revised course as compared to the previous year.