Initial Impact of a First-Year Design-Build-Test-Compete Course

Abstract Initial Impact of a First-Year Design-Build-Test-Compete Course October 7, 2010AbstractFor the past five years there have been experimental offerings of a first-year engineering course,Engineering 100-Blimp Section, that incorporated a very extensive design-build-test-compete(DBTC) pedagogy. This DBTC course was specifically positioned to exercise core engineeringcompetencies: understanding of societal needs, use of scientific and mathematical principles, anduse of technologies and fabrication. It also exercises algorithms to solve engineering problems,communication, and creativity.The course is intense in that it involves two Aerospace Engineering team projects, integratedtechnical communications and technical content, teamwork, and individual scientific andfabrication laboratories. The two team projects involve design, build, test, compete cycles withballoons and then with radio-controlled blimps. Since this course is experimental, it has beenoffered five times in parallel with more typical lecture-based offerings of Engineering 100.Enough students, 270 vs. 5000, have been taught in both formats to allow a quantitativecomparison of their performance in subsequent courses, thereby offering some insight into thedifferences in pedagogy.The students entering this DBTC blimp course and the other Engineering 100 courses werestudied with respect to typical admissions criteria including high school grades and test scores,advanced placement and transfer credit, and extracurricular activities. Performance in the variousfirst-year Engineering 100 courses and subsequent courses was studied by means of grades.Students elected the blimp course, and there is evidence of both self- and advised-selection.Notably, the average student electing the blimp course had lower high school entry credit than atypical student. (Entry credit is advanced placement and transfer credits brought into theUniversity minus any remedial math credits required at the University.) Despite this difference,the alumni of the Engineering 100 DBTC blimp course had a noticeable increase in their next-term’s grades compared to an average entry student; this improvement in performance was notuniform but was most significant for students who were admitted with lower entry credit (seeFigure 1). Blimp course alumni entering a subsequent entry-level Aerospace Engineeringcourse, Aerospace 245, displayed more uniform improvement over other students (see Figure 2).This improvement remained even when compared against cohort sub-sets that were selected tomatch the entry criteria for the DBTC blimp students.We hypothesize that the impact of this blimp course may be traced to DBTC components of thecourse: the extensive hands-on labs and two projects, a fast start-up to the course necessitated bythe team projects, and a teamwork debriefing component that occurs throughout the course. Wehypothesize that these aspects of the DBTC model lead to improved time-management skills,teamwork skills, and high-level planning skills that increase student performance in subsequentterms over that from other non-DBTC Engineering 100 offerings. These findings persist evenwhen controlled for commitment to major: first-year students choose and stay with their major inAerospace Engineering at our university at the 75% level, rather than the more usual 35% level.Figure 1: A comparison of all College of Engineering students taking an introductoryengineering course in the fall term (blue circles) to alumni of the DBTC blimp course(red-diamonds). Mean winter term grades1 are generally higher for blimp students4 atlower entry credit2.Figure 2: A comparison of Aerospace engineering students (blue circles) to alumni of theDBTC blimp course (red diamonds) who ultimately declared entry into the AerospaceEngineering program. Mean Aerospace 245 grade3 is generally higher or the same forblimp students4 with lower entry credit2 than for non-blimp students4.Notes:1) Grade is defined as grade-point-average in a range from 0 to 4. The blimp course has only been offered in the fall, this corresponds to the next term.2) Entry credit is defined as credit (advanced placement plus transfer minus remedial math) at the time of admission.3) Sophomore level entry course to the Aerospace Engineering program, typically taken the 3rd or 4th term in residence.4) Error bars represent the standard deviation of mean. A “*” overlaying the symbol indicates a single data point.