Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Students' ways of experiencing prototyping in the context of engineering design projects

About This Grant

Prototyping is a crucial activity in engineering solution design and development. Engineers regularly build multiple prototypes not only to test functionality, but also to explore ideas, communicate with teammates and stakeholders, learn from failures, and guide, decision-making throughout the design and development process. However, engineering undergraduate students often adopt a narrow view of prototyping, treating it primarily as a final step to verify that their design works. This limited perspective means that students may miss out on the deeper value of prototyping as a powerful tool for creative thinking, iterative problem-solving, and collaboration. In order to prepare engineering students to be effective and innovative engineers, we must better support them in understanding and using prototypes in the many ways they can support engineering work. Thus, this project will investigate how faculty teach prototyping, how students actually use prototypes in their coursework, and what factors support or hinder more expansive, reflective prototyping practices. This work will advance the national goal of improving engineering education by better aligning classroom experiences with the realities of professional practice. By studying both educator intentions and student experiences, the project will develop practical strategies that instructors can use to help students see prototyping not only as a technical skill, but also as a mindset and process for learning, communicating, and designing with purpose. This project will investigate the goals and practices of engineering educators as well as the behaviors and experiences of students with regard to prototyping in design-focused courses. Grounded in Social Cognitive Theory and the Prototyping for ‘X’ framework, the study will be guided by the following research questions: RQ1a) What goals do engineering faculty report having for how their students use prototyping? RQ1b) How do their pedagogy and assessment align (or not) with those goals as reported? RQ2a) How do students report using prototyping in their design projects? RQ2b) What factors do students report affecting how they use prototypes? Insights from this research have the potential to understand and address the current gaps in students’ use of prototypes and how engineering faculty goals and challenges and the classroom environment and experiences they create influence the ways that students prototype. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.