Engineering Design Contests and Courses: a Model-Based Taxonomy

Engineering faculty develop both design courses and design contests and competitions. These design experiences target and involve a wide variety of participants including students, faculty members, and members of the engineering profession. Given constraints on faculty time and resources, a common taxonomy and set of archetypes has the potential to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the design of these experiences. Such a taxonomy can also prompt discussion among engineering design educators regarding their design pedagogy. This paper presents the initial development of such a taxonomy by modeling design experiences using an engineering design process model. Each stage of the design process model has been augmented with a set of common design decisions found in such experiences at the University of Toronto. Although preliminary, this augmented model shows promise as the foundation of both a taxonomy of design experiences and a handbook of design experience design.