ABSTRACT Thesis (M.Sc.)-- University of Calgary, 1992. Reproduction. Includes bibliographical ref... more ABSTRACT Thesis (M.Sc.)-- University of Calgary, 1992. Reproduction. Includes bibliographical references.
A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refi... more A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refined over the past three years. This was done to address a three-fold need: undergraduate design courses can benefit from the involvement of teaching assistants who are well-prepared to contribute effectively to the day-to-day learning process, graduate students are seen to be capable of contributing significantly to design pedagogy, and these graduate students can also become much better prepared to take on leadership roles in the area of undergraduate teaching. It has long been assumed that the mere fact of exposure to many years of being taught provides sufficient preparation for graduate students to take on the teaching mantle. The shift away from conventional modes of teaching to inquiry-based learning, however, requires that teaching personnel take on quite different roles and use a distinctly different set of skills and tools than those with which they are familiar. Modeling the pe...
The Boyer Commission Report on Undergraduate Education of 1998 calls for universities to make a g... more The Boyer Commission Report on Undergraduate Education of 1998 calls for universities to make a greater commitment to the training and involvement of graduate students as teachers. Should this apply to the Engineering Design environment? Are there issues of responsibility, technical expertise and professional experience that exclude graduate students from the role of design coach? At the University of Calgary, in eight years of involvement with both faculty and graduate students as design coaches, we have come out strongly in favour of our graduate students. In fact, in most cases, graduate students get as good or better results from the undergraduate students than the faculty members. This paper explores the reasoning behind this result and the environment that produces the result. The focus is on the nature of the design environment as one of participatory inquiry. Perhaps the most significant feature of participatory inquiry is the creation of an environment in which all members (students and design coaches) are simultaneously student and teacher. In fact, the coaches regularly remark that they learn more about design by being a coach than through any other experience they have had. The faculty members, however, are often handicapped by their expertise.
The present study investigates the speech privacy and intelligibility o f closed spaces in multic... more The present study investigates the speech privacy and intelligibility o f closed spaces in multicultural environments. Most assessments for speech privacy and speech intelligibility among the current research rely on the subjective measurements utilized with the test materials o f English and other Western languages. Effects o f different languages and accents in speech privacy and speech intelligibility are usually overseen. Subjective measurements are conducted in this study for closed spaces by using English and a tonal language. The differences in speech privacy between the two languages are evident and significant. It is also found in this study that the existing single word tests used in research and industrial practice for subjectively evaluating speech privacy need modification when closed spaces are considered. The subjective measurement results of this study are compared with the objective measurement index AI. r é s u m é Le but de cette recherche est d'étudier l 'intimité et l 'intelligibilité des conversations dans des espaces clos en milieu multiculturel. La plupart des études se basent sur des données subjectives utilisées dans l 'étude des tests basés sur la langue Anglaise et d 'autres langues Occidentales. L'influence des accents et d'autes langues sur l 'intimité des conversations et l ' intelligibilité des conversations ne sont géneralement pas prises en compte. Des experiences subjectives ont été conduites dans cette étude dans des espaces clos en utilisant L'Anglais et une langue tonale. Les differences dans le cadre de l 'intimité des conversations entre les deux languages sont évidentes et significatives. Les résultats montrent aussi que le test basé sur la pronunciation d 'un seul mot tel qu' utlisé en recherche et dans le milieu industriel pour l'évaluation subjective, doit être modifié lorsque des espaces clos sont considérés. Les résultats de cette étude sont comparés avec les méthodes objectives utilisées dans l 'indice d 'articulation (IA). In the question sheet, the listener w ill read: (A) He doesn't like his work;
This investigation is on design and assessment of the vibratory and acoustical behavior of a bell... more This investigation is on design and assessment of the vibratory and acoustical behavior of a bell plate in imitating the sound of a bell to be used in a classical orchestral piece. In the investigation, the characteristics of the bell plate developed are compared to the real bell and a more traditional style of thin bell plate in four areas: the determination of the fundamental frequency, the spacing of the frequency partials, the relative strength of the partials and the decay envelope of the sound. The goal of this research is to gain further control over the four key components of the bell sound by capitalizing on beneficial constraints imposed on a metal plate by its material and three-dimensional geometry. The investigation led to the discovery of a small window of dimension that suppresses the undesirable vibrational modes and components of acoustic response of the freely suspended metal plate while at the same time emphasizes the bell-like qualities of the sound. The large as...
This paper tells two stories about interdisciplinarity: one is a practical story about interdisci... more This paper tells two stories about interdisciplinarity: one is a practical story about interdisciplinary teaching in an acoustics course for students from both music and engineering; the other is a theoretical story about how Walter Fisher's ideas about narrative can be combined with principles of participative inquiry to provide a conceptual framework for the interdisciplinary classroom. We call on Fisher's
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
Quantification of speech privacy in closed spaces is dependent on several factors: attenuation an... more Quantification of speech privacy in closed spaces is dependent on several factors: attenuation and absorption characteristics of the construction, background sound levels, speaking levels of the talker, the language and dialect, as well as accent used in the speech. Speech privacy is the opposite concept of speech intelligibility and can be assessed by the predictors of speech intelligibility. In this paper, several assessment methods of speech intelligibility are introduced. They are adapted to measure the speech privacy in closed offices, including standard ASTM E1130, speech transmission index (STI) and early‐to‐late ratio (clarity). The experimental results are used to evaluate the speech privacy index (PI), which is the rating number proposed for assessing the speech privacy. The subjective measurements offered by human subjects are also conducted using different languages: English and Mandarin Chinese. The test materials used in the speech intelligibility testing are single words (MRT words), senten...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1992
The tones of existing instruments are simulated in the time domain by means of standard finite di... more The tones of existing instruments are simulated in the time domain by means of standard finite difference
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
Up to now, most objective assessments for speech privacy and speech intelligibility, such as arti... more Up to now, most objective assessments for speech privacy and speech intelligibility, such as articulation index (AI), speech intelligibility index (SII), early‐to‐late sound ratio (Clarity), and speech transmission index (STI), are evaluated by subjective measurements primarily based on studies that incorporate only the English language. In today’s multicultural environment, it is necessary to study the impact on speech privacy of different languages and accents. In this work, subjective measurements were conducted in closed offices by using English, Mandarin Chinese (a tonal language), and accented English. Both close‐set and open‐set test materials, including single words, sentences, and articles were employed in the measurement. The results revealed the evaluation differences in speech privacy between two languages, as well as between native English and accented English. The subjective measurement results were also compared with the objective measurement indices AI, STI, and Clarity.
A tool and safety training program has been developed and implemented at the University of Calgar... more A tool and safety training program has been developed and implemented at the University of Calgary, Schulich School of Engineering for the first year design and communication courses. These courses promote a hands-on, inquiry based learning environment where ...
2010 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
The S_______ School of Engineering at the University of C____ admits ~730 first year students eac... more The S_______ School of Engineering at the University of C____ admits ~730 first year students each fall; these students are required to take a 'Common Core' program for their first year before choosing their field of engineering. As part of the Common Core year, all students take two half courses in Design and Communication. These two courses (ENGG 251 and ENGG 253) are interdisciplinary courses: the teaching team consists of engineers from all disciplines represented at the university (mechanical, electrical, etc); a fine arts instructor, specializing in drawing and sketching; and a technical writing instructor, specializing in written and oral communication. The 251/253 courses are project-based; students work in small groups on real world problems, are required to sketch and document their work and to write formal reports on their projects. While the 251/253 courses present a number of challenges to the instructional team, including the logistics of managing ~730 students and 30 Teaching Assistants, planning five new and unique projects for each academic year and integrating community groups into real-world scenarios, the largest challenge facing the team is that of consistency of assignment design and evaluation. This paper will describe a methodology for maintaining instructional and grading consistency across the many layers of student/tutorial assistant/instructor interaction. Due to the scope of the course, each of the five projects is developed by one or more instructors, with each of the 9 instructors contributing to at least one project. As the instructors come from a variety of backgrounds, consistency has been problematic-what one instructor considers complete assignment information, another considers either woefully inadequate or more detailed than necessary. In addition, as the course is project-based, there are no 'right' answers, only ones that are workable and ones that are not. To further complicate matters, the course emphasizes the design process, so that a group that had excellent process but did not fully succeed at the challenge can still receive an above average grade. Over the last two years, the instructor team has embarked on a new path to ensure consistent and effective assignment design and evaluation. This path, which takes advantage of the team's interdisciplinary strengths, has resulted in a 150% increase in student satisfaction with the course, based on the student rating questionnaires, and has reduces student appeals for remarking by 50%.
Volume 6: 15th Design for Manufacturing and the Lifecycle Conference; 7th Symposium on International Design and Design Education, 2010
Definitions of the engineering profession include “…application of scientific principles to desig... more Definitions of the engineering profession include “…application of scientific principles to design or develop machines, processes, works, etc.” Significant science-based content is therefore a feature of accredited engineering curricula — a feature tending to dominate the early years thereby establishing a particular learning environment. This paper 1) identifies how a dysfunctional relationship between learning of science and the practice of engineering can arise; and 2) presents ways to improve learning of both science and design through integrated science learning. Over the course of almost three decades of trying to improve engineering design learning at the University of Calgary — employing many of the approaches described at length in the engineering education literature — it became apparent that realization of our teaching goals (e.g. quality, innovation, agility, and establishing a basis for life-long learning) might require a fundamental change in the culture of learning. T...
A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refi... more A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refined over the past three years. This was done to address a three-fold need: undergraduate design courses can benefit from the involvement of teaching assistants who are well-prepared to contribute effectively to the day-to-day learning process, graduate students are seen to be capable of contributing significantly to design pedagogy, and these graduate students can also become much better prepared to take on leadership roles in the area of undergraduate teaching. It has long been assumed that the mere fact of exposure to many years of being taught provides sufficient preparation for graduate students to take on the teaching mantle. The shift away from conventional modes of teaching to inquiry-based learning, however, requires that teaching personnel take on quite different roles and use a distinctly different set of skills and tools than those with which they are familiar. Modeling the pe...
At the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, 730 first year students are require... more At the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, 730 first year students are required to take two half courses in Design and Communications. These courses (ENGG 251 and ENGG 253) are project-based, with students participating in 5 real-world design projects each year. The course capstone project is an eight week design challenge that requires students to collaborate with a social agency on developing solutions to current social issues in Calgary and around the world. The topic of this paper centers on the potential for simultaneous and multiple level learning events by placing design and communication skill development in the social and cultural arena. At the Schulich School of Engineering, the first year design and communication course partners with local and international agencies that welcome the opportunity to benefit from the creative abilities of over 700 students collaborating in 200 teams and to participate in the creation of engineers who are able to see the br...
The pedagogical approach to teaching mechanical and manufacturing engineering design at the Unive... more The pedagogical approach to teaching mechanical and manufacturing engineering design at the University of Calgary has moved towards one that has students taking responsibility for both the progress of their design projects and their learning. This, in addition to the assignment of “real” projects means that a linear, regimented approach to teaching design has limited effectiveness. Therefore, a fundamental change in teaching and learning methods and materials has been implemented. The primary results of this change are the subject of this paper. In particular, the move from design textbooks to a documentary approach that fosters greater student independence and creativity through the development of instructor and student manuals is discussed. The goal of this approach is to ensure that novice designers learn to synthesize and adapt their knowledge and resources to the needs of the design project rather than try to force the project to conform to a prescriptive process. The use of de...
ENGG 251: Design and Communications One and ENGG 253: Design and Communications Two are the flags... more ENGG 251: Design and Communications One and ENGG 253: Design and Communications Two are the flagship courses for the Common Core year at The S___ School of Engineering, University of C___. Mandatory courses for all first year (~730) students, ENGG 251/253 are project-based courses on engineering design, taught by an interdisciplinary team drawn from all divisions of engineering, fine arts and communications. This paper serves to examine the role and work of the communications instructor within that interdisciplinary team, and to offer some insight into the ways that communications can be integrated into the engineering curriculum, as well as the benefits that communications brings to the instructor team. Because of the unique interdisciplinary structure of these courses, the communications instructor holds a tri-partite position as a solo instructor, a team instructor, and as the course technical writer. As a solo instructor, the communication instructor delivers 6-8 1-hour lectures...
The roles and responsibilities of those involved in an engineering design course have evolved and... more The roles and responsibilities of those involved in an engineering design course have evolved and been refined since the introduction of real world, industry-sponsored design projects. Both students and those helping in the course can now be provided with guidance as to expectations of everyone involved. The role of instructor has been enlarged to that of Coordinator − a role that requires much more planning and management activity. (Graduate) teaching assistants have been given a much enhanced teaching role – that of a Design Coach − a role that specifically supports inquiry-based learning. Furthermore, new and expanded expectations have been placed on the undergraduate student Design Team in that they must assume much more responsibility for their learning and the progress of their project work. Employing real-world projects has led to involvement of more people who each contribute in their own ways. Each project now has its own Project Supervisor who typically acts to connect the...
Independent life becomes a challenge for individuals with disabilities when disability research a... more Independent life becomes a challenge for individuals with disabilities when disability research and development fails to produce results that are beneficial for the disabled community. Poor research and development in disability research creates socially constructed barriers that not only offend the disabled community but also make means of attaining the maximum amount of independence more difficult. These barriers include the discriminatory actions and attitudes of non-disabled individuals as well as poor design in infrastructure, communication and transportation. Insufficient engineering and a lack of consideration of the needs and abilities of the disabled community has led to the incorporation of a Aids for Assisted Living project in a first year engineering curriculum. Engineering Communication and Design is a course that has developed two projects in collaboration with the disabled community in hopes of increasing awareness among students and staff as well as providing means for the community to be actively involved in product development and research. The first project focuses on increasing the independence of children with disabilities in play, through the design of toys and multifunctional play centers for a children's hospital. The second project focuses on the increase of independence for adults with disabilities around the home, specifically in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room. Both of these Aids for Assisted Living projects were developed through extensive consultations with the disabled community with the common goal of starting to diminish some of the socially constructed barriers experienced in disability research. This is hoped to be achieved through student-research subject interaction as well as engineering principles and design. Engineering principles, incorporated through the foundation of the design trinity: familiarization, functionality and testing will be applied to disability design by students who will use these principles to create a fully functional prototype.
ABSTRACT Thesis (M.Sc.)-- University of Calgary, 1992. Reproduction. Includes bibliographical ref... more ABSTRACT Thesis (M.Sc.)-- University of Calgary, 1992. Reproduction. Includes bibliographical references.
A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refi... more A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refined over the past three years. This was done to address a three-fold need: undergraduate design courses can benefit from the involvement of teaching assistants who are well-prepared to contribute effectively to the day-to-day learning process, graduate students are seen to be capable of contributing significantly to design pedagogy, and these graduate students can also become much better prepared to take on leadership roles in the area of undergraduate teaching. It has long been assumed that the mere fact of exposure to many years of being taught provides sufficient preparation for graduate students to take on the teaching mantle. The shift away from conventional modes of teaching to inquiry-based learning, however, requires that teaching personnel take on quite different roles and use a distinctly different set of skills and tools than those with which they are familiar. Modeling the pe...
The Boyer Commission Report on Undergraduate Education of 1998 calls for universities to make a g... more The Boyer Commission Report on Undergraduate Education of 1998 calls for universities to make a greater commitment to the training and involvement of graduate students as teachers. Should this apply to the Engineering Design environment? Are there issues of responsibility, technical expertise and professional experience that exclude graduate students from the role of design coach? At the University of Calgary, in eight years of involvement with both faculty and graduate students as design coaches, we have come out strongly in favour of our graduate students. In fact, in most cases, graduate students get as good or better results from the undergraduate students than the faculty members. This paper explores the reasoning behind this result and the environment that produces the result. The focus is on the nature of the design environment as one of participatory inquiry. Perhaps the most significant feature of participatory inquiry is the creation of an environment in which all members (students and design coaches) are simultaneously student and teacher. In fact, the coaches regularly remark that they learn more about design by being a coach than through any other experience they have had. The faculty members, however, are often handicapped by their expertise.
The present study investigates the speech privacy and intelligibility o f closed spaces in multic... more The present study investigates the speech privacy and intelligibility o f closed spaces in multicultural environments. Most assessments for speech privacy and speech intelligibility among the current research rely on the subjective measurements utilized with the test materials o f English and other Western languages. Effects o f different languages and accents in speech privacy and speech intelligibility are usually overseen. Subjective measurements are conducted in this study for closed spaces by using English and a tonal language. The differences in speech privacy between the two languages are evident and significant. It is also found in this study that the existing single word tests used in research and industrial practice for subjectively evaluating speech privacy need modification when closed spaces are considered. The subjective measurement results of this study are compared with the objective measurement index AI. r é s u m é Le but de cette recherche est d'étudier l 'intimité et l 'intelligibilité des conversations dans des espaces clos en milieu multiculturel. La plupart des études se basent sur des données subjectives utilisées dans l 'étude des tests basés sur la langue Anglaise et d 'autres langues Occidentales. L'influence des accents et d'autes langues sur l 'intimité des conversations et l ' intelligibilité des conversations ne sont géneralement pas prises en compte. Des experiences subjectives ont été conduites dans cette étude dans des espaces clos en utilisant L'Anglais et une langue tonale. Les differences dans le cadre de l 'intimité des conversations entre les deux languages sont évidentes et significatives. Les résultats montrent aussi que le test basé sur la pronunciation d 'un seul mot tel qu' utlisé en recherche et dans le milieu industriel pour l'évaluation subjective, doit être modifié lorsque des espaces clos sont considérés. Les résultats de cette étude sont comparés avec les méthodes objectives utilisées dans l 'indice d 'articulation (IA). In the question sheet, the listener w ill read: (A) He doesn't like his work;
This investigation is on design and assessment of the vibratory and acoustical behavior of a bell... more This investigation is on design and assessment of the vibratory and acoustical behavior of a bell plate in imitating the sound of a bell to be used in a classical orchestral piece. In the investigation, the characteristics of the bell plate developed are compared to the real bell and a more traditional style of thin bell plate in four areas: the determination of the fundamental frequency, the spacing of the frequency partials, the relative strength of the partials and the decay envelope of the sound. The goal of this research is to gain further control over the four key components of the bell sound by capitalizing on beneficial constraints imposed on a metal plate by its material and three-dimensional geometry. The investigation led to the discovery of a small window of dimension that suppresses the undesirable vibrational modes and components of acoustic response of the freely suspended metal plate while at the same time emphasizes the bell-like qualities of the sound. The large as...
This paper tells two stories about interdisciplinarity: one is a practical story about interdisci... more This paper tells two stories about interdisciplinarity: one is a practical story about interdisciplinary teaching in an acoustics course for students from both music and engineering; the other is a theoretical story about how Walter Fisher's ideas about narrative can be combined with principles of participative inquiry to provide a conceptual framework for the interdisciplinary classroom. We call on Fisher's
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
Quantification of speech privacy in closed spaces is dependent on several factors: attenuation an... more Quantification of speech privacy in closed spaces is dependent on several factors: attenuation and absorption characteristics of the construction, background sound levels, speaking levels of the talker, the language and dialect, as well as accent used in the speech. Speech privacy is the opposite concept of speech intelligibility and can be assessed by the predictors of speech intelligibility. In this paper, several assessment methods of speech intelligibility are introduced. They are adapted to measure the speech privacy in closed offices, including standard ASTM E1130, speech transmission index (STI) and early‐to‐late ratio (clarity). The experimental results are used to evaluate the speech privacy index (PI), which is the rating number proposed for assessing the speech privacy. The subjective measurements offered by human subjects are also conducted using different languages: English and Mandarin Chinese. The test materials used in the speech intelligibility testing are single words (MRT words), senten...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1992
The tones of existing instruments are simulated in the time domain by means of standard finite di... more The tones of existing instruments are simulated in the time domain by means of standard finite difference
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
Up to now, most objective assessments for speech privacy and speech intelligibility, such as arti... more Up to now, most objective assessments for speech privacy and speech intelligibility, such as articulation index (AI), speech intelligibility index (SII), early‐to‐late sound ratio (Clarity), and speech transmission index (STI), are evaluated by subjective measurements primarily based on studies that incorporate only the English language. In today’s multicultural environment, it is necessary to study the impact on speech privacy of different languages and accents. In this work, subjective measurements were conducted in closed offices by using English, Mandarin Chinese (a tonal language), and accented English. Both close‐set and open‐set test materials, including single words, sentences, and articles were employed in the measurement. The results revealed the evaluation differences in speech privacy between two languages, as well as between native English and accented English. The subjective measurement results were also compared with the objective measurement indices AI, STI, and Clarity.
A tool and safety training program has been developed and implemented at the University of Calgar... more A tool and safety training program has been developed and implemented at the University of Calgary, Schulich School of Engineering for the first year design and communication courses. These courses promote a hands-on, inquiry based learning environment where ...
2010 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
The S_______ School of Engineering at the University of C____ admits ~730 first year students eac... more The S_______ School of Engineering at the University of C____ admits ~730 first year students each fall; these students are required to take a 'Common Core' program for their first year before choosing their field of engineering. As part of the Common Core year, all students take two half courses in Design and Communication. These two courses (ENGG 251 and ENGG 253) are interdisciplinary courses: the teaching team consists of engineers from all disciplines represented at the university (mechanical, electrical, etc); a fine arts instructor, specializing in drawing and sketching; and a technical writing instructor, specializing in written and oral communication. The 251/253 courses are project-based; students work in small groups on real world problems, are required to sketch and document their work and to write formal reports on their projects. While the 251/253 courses present a number of challenges to the instructional team, including the logistics of managing ~730 students and 30 Teaching Assistants, planning five new and unique projects for each academic year and integrating community groups into real-world scenarios, the largest challenge facing the team is that of consistency of assignment design and evaluation. This paper will describe a methodology for maintaining instructional and grading consistency across the many layers of student/tutorial assistant/instructor interaction. Due to the scope of the course, each of the five projects is developed by one or more instructors, with each of the 9 instructors contributing to at least one project. As the instructors come from a variety of backgrounds, consistency has been problematic-what one instructor considers complete assignment information, another considers either woefully inadequate or more detailed than necessary. In addition, as the course is project-based, there are no 'right' answers, only ones that are workable and ones that are not. To further complicate matters, the course emphasizes the design process, so that a group that had excellent process but did not fully succeed at the challenge can still receive an above average grade. Over the last two years, the instructor team has embarked on a new path to ensure consistent and effective assignment design and evaluation. This path, which takes advantage of the team's interdisciplinary strengths, has resulted in a 150% increase in student satisfaction with the course, based on the student rating questionnaires, and has reduces student appeals for remarking by 50%.
Volume 6: 15th Design for Manufacturing and the Lifecycle Conference; 7th Symposium on International Design and Design Education, 2010
Definitions of the engineering profession include “…application of scientific principles to desig... more Definitions of the engineering profession include “…application of scientific principles to design or develop machines, processes, works, etc.” Significant science-based content is therefore a feature of accredited engineering curricula — a feature tending to dominate the early years thereby establishing a particular learning environment. This paper 1) identifies how a dysfunctional relationship between learning of science and the practice of engineering can arise; and 2) presents ways to improve learning of both science and design through integrated science learning. Over the course of almost three decades of trying to improve engineering design learning at the University of Calgary — employing many of the approaches described at length in the engineering education literature — it became apparent that realization of our teaching goals (e.g. quality, innovation, agility, and establishing a basis for life-long learning) might require a fundamental change in the culture of learning. T...
A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refi... more A graduate course in the pedagogy of engineering design has been developed, implemented, and refined over the past three years. This was done to address a three-fold need: undergraduate design courses can benefit from the involvement of teaching assistants who are well-prepared to contribute effectively to the day-to-day learning process, graduate students are seen to be capable of contributing significantly to design pedagogy, and these graduate students can also become much better prepared to take on leadership roles in the area of undergraduate teaching. It has long been assumed that the mere fact of exposure to many years of being taught provides sufficient preparation for graduate students to take on the teaching mantle. The shift away from conventional modes of teaching to inquiry-based learning, however, requires that teaching personnel take on quite different roles and use a distinctly different set of skills and tools than those with which they are familiar. Modeling the pe...
At the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, 730 first year students are require... more At the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary, 730 first year students are required to take two half courses in Design and Communications. These courses (ENGG 251 and ENGG 253) are project-based, with students participating in 5 real-world design projects each year. The course capstone project is an eight week design challenge that requires students to collaborate with a social agency on developing solutions to current social issues in Calgary and around the world. The topic of this paper centers on the potential for simultaneous and multiple level learning events by placing design and communication skill development in the social and cultural arena. At the Schulich School of Engineering, the first year design and communication course partners with local and international agencies that welcome the opportunity to benefit from the creative abilities of over 700 students collaborating in 200 teams and to participate in the creation of engineers who are able to see the br...
The pedagogical approach to teaching mechanical and manufacturing engineering design at the Unive... more The pedagogical approach to teaching mechanical and manufacturing engineering design at the University of Calgary has moved towards one that has students taking responsibility for both the progress of their design projects and their learning. This, in addition to the assignment of “real” projects means that a linear, regimented approach to teaching design has limited effectiveness. Therefore, a fundamental change in teaching and learning methods and materials has been implemented. The primary results of this change are the subject of this paper. In particular, the move from design textbooks to a documentary approach that fosters greater student independence and creativity through the development of instructor and student manuals is discussed. The goal of this approach is to ensure that novice designers learn to synthesize and adapt their knowledge and resources to the needs of the design project rather than try to force the project to conform to a prescriptive process. The use of de...
ENGG 251: Design and Communications One and ENGG 253: Design and Communications Two are the flags... more ENGG 251: Design and Communications One and ENGG 253: Design and Communications Two are the flagship courses for the Common Core year at The S___ School of Engineering, University of C___. Mandatory courses for all first year (~730) students, ENGG 251/253 are project-based courses on engineering design, taught by an interdisciplinary team drawn from all divisions of engineering, fine arts and communications. This paper serves to examine the role and work of the communications instructor within that interdisciplinary team, and to offer some insight into the ways that communications can be integrated into the engineering curriculum, as well as the benefits that communications brings to the instructor team. Because of the unique interdisciplinary structure of these courses, the communications instructor holds a tri-partite position as a solo instructor, a team instructor, and as the course technical writer. As a solo instructor, the communication instructor delivers 6-8 1-hour lectures...
The roles and responsibilities of those involved in an engineering design course have evolved and... more The roles and responsibilities of those involved in an engineering design course have evolved and been refined since the introduction of real world, industry-sponsored design projects. Both students and those helping in the course can now be provided with guidance as to expectations of everyone involved. The role of instructor has been enlarged to that of Coordinator − a role that requires much more planning and management activity. (Graduate) teaching assistants have been given a much enhanced teaching role – that of a Design Coach − a role that specifically supports inquiry-based learning. Furthermore, new and expanded expectations have been placed on the undergraduate student Design Team in that they must assume much more responsibility for their learning and the progress of their project work. Employing real-world projects has led to involvement of more people who each contribute in their own ways. Each project now has its own Project Supervisor who typically acts to connect the...
Independent life becomes a challenge for individuals with disabilities when disability research a... more Independent life becomes a challenge for individuals with disabilities when disability research and development fails to produce results that are beneficial for the disabled community. Poor research and development in disability research creates socially constructed barriers that not only offend the disabled community but also make means of attaining the maximum amount of independence more difficult. These barriers include the discriminatory actions and attitudes of non-disabled individuals as well as poor design in infrastructure, communication and transportation. Insufficient engineering and a lack of consideration of the needs and abilities of the disabled community has led to the incorporation of a Aids for Assisted Living project in a first year engineering curriculum. Engineering Communication and Design is a course that has developed two projects in collaboration with the disabled community in hopes of increasing awareness among students and staff as well as providing means for the community to be actively involved in product development and research. The first project focuses on increasing the independence of children with disabilities in play, through the design of toys and multifunctional play centers for a children's hospital. The second project focuses on the increase of independence for adults with disabilities around the home, specifically in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and living room. Both of these Aids for Assisted Living projects were developed through extensive consultations with the disabled community with the common goal of starting to diminish some of the socially constructed barriers experienced in disability research. This is hoped to be achieved through student-research subject interaction as well as engineering principles and design. Engineering principles, incorporated through the foundation of the design trinity: familiarization, functionality and testing will be applied to disability design by students who will use these principles to create a fully functional prototype.
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Papers by Daryl Caswell