Supporting First-Year Students to Set Engineering Requirements

In this Education Research and Assessment Paper, we present results from a design-based research (DBR) study. While first-year design is now a common approach in engineering, less is known about supporting students to frame problems, especially setting engineering requirements. We report on an instructional intervention in the context of an integrative first-year course. Student teams framed problems related to water resilience in New Mexico. Data include student work and video/audio recordings of class sessions. Using qualitative analysis, we investigate how instructional supports helped students frame such problems. Teams posed tentative solutions in order to identify ERs; this can be a foundation for oscillation between solution and problem in the problem framing process.