Prototyping to Learn: Characterizing Engineering Students’ Prototyping Activities and Prototypes

Prototyping is an activity core to designing and engineering, though an activity that has traditionally been under examined. Through observations of students' prototyping activities during a year-long design engineering project-based learning course, this paper hopes to better characterize the types of prototypes student engineers make in the course of their designing and to better understand how prototypes aid in their learning to be better designers. Common prototyping techniques are divided into categories of design thinking prototypes and engineering thinking prototypes. Student reflections are used to explore some emergent themes about their use of prototypes.