期刊名称：Proceedings of the Canadian Engineering Education Association
出版年度：2011
语种：English
出版社：The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA)
摘要：Are we aware of how challenging the design engineering projects are that we assign to engineering students? This paper emphasizes the pedagogical importance of evaluating the dynamics of the iterative tasks pertaining to assigned design engineering term projects in academia for reasons of quantifying, balancing and adjusting their relative level of difficulty. Methodologies exist in industry for large projects, such as for example the design of the various systems of automobiles or aircraft, to assist engineers and project managers with the efficient planning of such tasks, possibly eliminating some of the iterations altogether, as well as ordering tasks (where eliminating iteration is impossible) to minimize duration of coupled tasks. The Design Structure Matrix (DSM), which along with its extension – the Work Transformation Matrix (WTM), have proven to be useful methodologies for predicting convergence of iteration, as well as in figuring out which coupled tasks will require several iterations to reach a technical solution. In this context, a DSM/WTM-based method is proposed that educators within an engineering curriculum could apply to pre-determine the difficulty of the design projects they assign and could adjust them, if necessary, so to be commensurate to the current academic level of the respective learners.
