To mold the innovators of the future, engineering schools must educate engineers who can generate creative solutions to design problems. We examined the innovation capabilities of freshman and senior undergraduate engineering students through a concept generation exercise using the 6-3-5 method. Their concepts were scored for originality, and originality was correlated with individual differenc...

The role of standards is increasing, and as a result the role of education about standards should also increase. At the same time, there are a set of requirements—accreditation criteria—toward engineering programs. The close relationships between the accreditation criteria and standards education is not fully recognized, even by accreditation bodies and educators. The goal of this paper is to u...

This paper presents a framework for a learning based approach to dynamically evolve the conceptual structure of a database in order to facilitate virtual representation of data in a CAD environment. A generic object model is presented which spans applications from a wide range of engineering design domains. The object model is complemented with a schema model. The object model and the schema mo...

Brophy, Klein, Portmore, and Rogers (2008) admitted that, as industries are driven by the rapid development of enabling technologies, they must become more flexible and adaptive to remain competitive. This flexibility is achieved through a workforce that can utilize newly available technologies and generate innovations of their own. They further suggested that such technological capability in t...

Capturing design information and decisions is critical to supporting re-use of designs and coordination in engineering teams. Most of this information is currently not recorded at all. In this research we focus on the role of electronic engineering notebooks in the capture, storage and dissemination of design information and decisions, and on their role in integrating and managing design decisi...

Background Study of design and norms for designing dates back 2000 years when Vitruvious first wrote his book on architectural design and prescribed what a designer ought to know and how he/she ought to behave. The perceived need to organize and systematize design started with the first conference on design in 1962. Subsequently, there have been numerous conferences and articles on various aspe...

A technique to perform design calculations on imprecise representations of parameters has been developed and is presented. The level of imprecision in the description of design elements is typically high in the preliminary phase of engineering design. This imprecision is represented using the fuzzy calculus. Calculations can be performed using this method, to produce (imprecise) performance par...

Recently a new design methodology, EnvironmentBased Design (EBD) [1, 2] has been developed. In using the model of EBD, three elements are important: primitive synthesis knowledge, primitive environment and primitive solutions. Based on the three elements, three design strategies have been validated in [3] for generating new design solutions: formulating design problems differently, changing the...

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Our approach to understanding mobile learning begins by describing a dialectical approach to the development and presentation of a task model using the socio-cognitive engineering design method. This analysis synthesises relevant theoretical approaches. We then examine two field studies which feed into the development of the task model.