INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN ICED 95 PRAHA, August 22-24, 1995 HOW STUDENTS CONNECT ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTALS TO HARDWARE DESIGN: Observations and Implications for the Design of Curriculum and Assessment Methods Margot Brereton, Sheri Sheppard and Larry Leifer ABSTRACT: This paper explores how engineering students use fundamental concepts studied in analysis classes as they undertake experiences in hardware design and dissection. Examples are drawn from videotape studies and in situ observations of students. We observed that students learn by reflecting on their experiences and by linking and contextualizing theoretical and practical knowledge. Curriculum design and assessment methods that help foster these skills are discussed. INHALTSANGABE: In dieser Studie wird untersucht wie Studenten die prinzipiellen Konzepte, welche sie in Kursen der Analysis erlernt haben, zu Erfahrungen in Hardware Design in Beziehung setzen. 1. INTRODUCTION Fundamental concepts (such as torque, moment, friction) are part of the everyday language of engineering designers. They enable us to describe experiences with hardware and furthermore enhance our abilities to generalize and make predictions about hardware. Since the half life of the fundamentals of a field is a lot longer than the half life of today’s technology, it is worth investing in learning and using fundamentals [1, 2]. However a large body of research in physics learning shows that students have difficulty connecting abstract concepts to their experiential understandings [3]. And yet in daily work of designing, troubleshooting, modeling and discussing, engineers use various levels of abstraction to help them relate to real artifacts and experiences (and vice versa) as illustrated in Figure 1. This paper explores how students relate fundamental concepts they have learned in analysis classes to experiences with hardware. Abstract World Experiential World symbols/ equations/ graphs/ sketches prototyping/ testing building/ dissecting hardware fundamental concepts imagined product real product experienced product using software product requirements/ specifications modeling/ simulations Figure 1: Learning engineering design requires us to develop rich links between our experiential and abstract understandings.