Carnegie Mellon  RAIRE award

Rapid Design

1. Overview

The Rapid Design class has been taught since spring semester 1996. The course has no lectures. During class time, students are working on design exercises, making presentations, talking to each other, going on site visits, and working in teams. During the first half of the semester, the students do a series of exercises and labs in which they teach each other: how children learn about science; how different rapid manufacturing processes work; and how to work in teams.

All the students' assignments, reports, presentations, and assessments are stored on the World Wide Web. Students created Web pages to make their reports available to the rest of the class. They also used the web to document their designs. The students create a virtual prototypes on the computer and have access to rapid manufacturing technologies at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Berkeley. Each team manufactures at least one part of their final project using one of the rapid manufacturing technologies. The students spend the second half of the course working in groups to design hands-on outreach activities to teach children about a particular concept in engineering. The design requirements for the activities are to:

  • attract a child's attention,
  • be interactive and fun,
  • be self explanatory,
  • build on a child's everyday experience,
  • be durable and safe,
  • ideally allow for cooperative play with groups of children, and
  • ideally engage all of a child's senses.
The students test their outreach activities on several different groups of children including the children who come to Carnegie Mellon for Take Our Daughters to Work Day and for Moving 4th into Engineering. The students present their projects at the annual undergraduate research symposium, The Meeting of the Minds.

1.1 Catalogue description of the class

Introduction to rapid design of mechanisms through virtual and physical prototyping. The class will cover the design process, problem solving methods, interdisciplinary team work, current industrial practice, and manufacturing process capabilities. Students will participate in team projects in which they design and build mechanism exhibits for the Carnegie Science Center.

Students in this course will have the opportunity to explore and evaluate rapid and virtual prototyping services in the context of collaborative design. This course will:

  • expose students to the roles of virtual and rapid prototyping for reducing design cycle times and promoting a concurrent engineering approach.
  • expose students to using rapid and virtual prototyping as a way to communicate design ideas.
  • familiarize students with using the Internet communication infrastructure for accessing tools and services for design, analysis, simulation, and manufacturing.
  • provide students with a design experience in which they create interactive exhibits to help children learn the basic principles of mechanisms.
Warning: This course will use experimental software and experimental manufacturing facilities. This is the first time this course is being offered. This course should not be taken by students who cannot deal with uncertainty, ambiguity or surprises.

2. Course Evolution

The Rapid Design class has evolved over time, particularly due to the assessment activities required by the RAIRE award. For the asssessment, Susan Finger, the instructor for the course, had to make the learning goals for the students taking the course more explicit and had to devise ways to assess whether these learning goals were being met. In Spring 1998, the external evaluator, Larissa Naples, did extensive classroom observations and interviewed many of the students. In addition, the students were required to make portfolios for the class using the new ABET engineering criteria. Even though this data is still being analyzed, the preliminary results were helpful in revising some of the exercises and giving the instructor more insight into what the students were learning in the course. This past semester, we used pre and post questionaires to help us assess what the students know when they enter the class and what they know when they leave.

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sfinger@ri.cmu.edu