Collaborative Design Lab for Education and Learning

Project introduction and background information

Engineers are increasingly required to work on complex design projects in which successful problem-solving requires the collaborative efforts of a multidisciplinary team. To prepare engineering students for these professional practices, educational institutions increasingly implement engineering design activities in which students can develop new collaborative design practices, such as concurrent design. Still, it was found that students are often hesitant to adopt new collaborative practices and tools, and stick to ways of working they already know.

In the current project, we aim to develop educational design principles to foster the development of students’ new collaborative practices and tools. Specifically, we investigate how the tools available in the Collaborative Design Lab (CDL) can be integrated in courses in order to teach agile project management and concurrent engineering practices.

Objective and expected outcomes

In the upcoming years, we will use a design based research approach to iteratively develop a course in the CDL, while simultaneously formulating theory informed design principles to foster students’ development of new practices and tool use.  Next to these practical outcomes, we will also publish about our work in multiple scientific conferences and journals.

Results and learnings

• van Helden, G., Zandbergen, B.C.T., Shvarts, A. Y., Specht, M.M., & Gill, E.K.A. (Accepted) An embodied cognition approach to collaborative engineering design activities. In Proceedings of the 51th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education – SEFI 2023.
• van Helden, G., Zandbergen, B.C.T., Specht, M.M., & Gill, E.K.A. (2023). Implementation of Collaborative Learning in Engineering Design Education: A Systematic Literature Review. IEEE Transactions on Education, doi:10.1109/TE.2023.3283609
• van Helden, G., Zandbergen, B. T. C., Specht, M. M., & Gill, E. K. A. (2022). Student perceptions on a collaborative engineering design course. In Järvinen, H., Silvestre, S., Llorens, A., & Nagy., B. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education – SEFI 2022 (pp. 782-796), doi:10.5821/conference-9788412322262.1323