Educational Deflection Analyser

Abstract

This graduation project explores the problem of teaching engineering education through the course Understanding Product Engineering (UPE) to first year bachelor students at the TU Delft faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, which is a significant issue in the context of the reduction of time allocated to technical subjects in the programme. Moreover, students are not applying their engineering knowledge and skills in their design projects, possibly meaning the way it is educated is not effective. The primary goal of this research is to design an experiential machine, aiming to address the lack of practical, hands-on learning experiences in early engineering education through the development of a prototype and accompanying educational module. This is guided by the Productive Failure learning approach.

The project began with an initial exploration phase, where the different subjects of UPE were explored, a questionnaire was conducted and literature was reviewed to understand the end users’ needs and how to effectively teach subjects. From this, several key findings emerged, including the choice of direction for statics with a focus on beam bending. Additionally, it was discovered that teaching relies heavily on the way motivation in students is created.

Based on these insights, the next phase involved generating design concepts and developing a proof of concept for an experiential machine, guided by the requirements that followed from a deeper look into the subject of statics and beam bending. This concept phase culminated in the embodiment of the Educational Deflection Analyser (EDA), which was further refined through technical assessments and user tests.

To validate the design, two user tests were conducted, and the results indicated that the EDA is a functional proof-of-concept with the potential to engage students by sparking their curiosity to learn something new. Despite requiring some future iterations concerning the usability and full integration in the educational context, the project successfully developed a setup to teach first year students the fundamentals of product engineering.

In conclusion, this report demonstrates that with continued development, the EDA holds the potential to become an effective learning tool in the future to make engineering education enjoyable and see the application reflected in design projects. Future work could focus on the improvement of the user-friendliness, elaborate evaluation and digital integration of the electronics.