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Contribution: This article defines "curricular hackathons" and describes the features, challenges, and opportunities of adopting the hackathon format into engineering curricula. It is based on experience implementing a series of curricular hackathons which provide students with formative design experiences as they address ill-structured and integrative design problems. Background: Design is an essential part of engineering practice. However, undergraduate engineering students are provided few opportunities to develop the skills necessary for solving ill-structured and complex design problems prior to their final year capstone projects. Cornerstone projects and other summative activities are common attempts to introduce students to design, but often carry significant academic weight in the host course. Adapting the hackathon format into curricular elements could provide a useful pedagogy for formative design practice. Research Question: How can the hackathon format be effectively adapted into curricular activities? Methodology: The study uses a multiple case study research design to extract insight from 12 implementations of curricular hackathons in engineering at the University of Waterloo. The twelve cases were analyzed through two methods: 1) a synthesis of eight previous publications and 2) an interview study of 12 instructors involved in their design and implementation. Findings: Adapting the popular hackathon format to a curricular setting requires several adaptations to maximize the impact on students. Curricular hackathons: are a short, high intensity social experience; that guide students through the design-build-test cycle of a design problem, include opportunities for reflection; and achieve some level of integration and/or embedding in a program's curriculum.

The design of balanced assembly lines, especially when considering workforce, material, and cycle time factors, is an important managerial decision-making activity in manufacturing firms. Numerous active learning activities are available to assist instructors in teaching assembly line balancing to students. While effective in improving student engagement, they require considerable planning and expense on the part of instructors, and they may be difficult to implement in inflexible teaching spaces and lecture-oriented curricula. We present a new approach to teaching line balancing using online videos depicting an assembly process. Students design an assembly line by determining themselves how to separate and time tasks, rather than by modifying an existing configuration. To save valuable classroom time, students complete a portion of the activity outside of class. This blended learning approach allows for all students to be engaged in the activity, both in and out of class. Furthermore, a controlled study showed that compared to the traditional lecture format, it better equips students to address less tangible aspects of line balancing, such as ergonomic and workforce factors, material handling considerations, and changing cycle time. With the online content for this activity completely developed and available, other instructors can easily implement this approach within their courses.

Design occurs in complex socio-technical contexts with conflicting stakeholder goals, requirements and other constraints. These limit solution options and create trade-offs where improvements relative to one goal come at the expense of performance on another. Little is known about how the design context influences trade-offs, or how designers interact with context to manage trade-offs. This article reports on an exploratory qualitative interview study investigating design trade-offs in relation to their socio-technical context. We identified nine themes reflecting engineering designers' perceptions of the influence of the design context on their ability to resolve trade-offs. Findings suggest that the design context is both a source of trade-offs, and of knowledge and information that helps designers clarify ambiguous requirements to navigate and resolve trade-offs. The results provide insight into how designers interactwith the design context to learn about the structure of their design problems and the degrees of freedom available to resolve trade-offs. The findings also contribute to understanding the effects of path dependencies in trade-off situations, and how the sequential distribution of design decisions over time constrains trade-off resolution. We discuss some of the goals and challenges of conducting rigorous qualitative research in design and identify potential directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development and implementation of a survey instrument, based on Jonassen's design theory of problem solving, which characterizes educational design activities. The motivation behind this work is to determine the effectiveness of authentic problem solving activities - called Engineering Design Days - implemented in the University of Waterloo's 14 engineering programs. The instrument is a guided survey given to instructors which captures an activity's problem variation and representation. The survey was developed through a number of iterations. with refinements addressing observed shortcomings in the collected data. Its application is demonstrated with a case study of one design activity that was offered to first year software engineering students. The survey captures many of the elements of Jonassen's design theory of problem solving as they pertain to educational design activities. Future work will focus on applying the instrument to additional educational design activities, which may inform future evolutions to the survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability and sustainable design have been a part of design discourse for over three decades, yet most designs today remain unsustainable. The size, complexity and at times redundancy of the literature on both sustainability and sustainable design have become barriers to the integration and acceptance of sustainable design within industry and education. This paper attempts to uncover an underlying structure to the literature and distill key concepts for engineering design educators interested in teaching sustainable design. The paper also synthesizes key attributes and skills common within sustainable design approaches to provide guidance for educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hackathons and hackathon-like events are gaining significant popularity as extra-curricular events among engineering undergraduate students. While not always explicitly promoted as such, these events provide participants with exposure to, and experience in design. Not surprisingly then, the hackathon format is slowly starting to be used as a novel design pedagogy in engineering, increasingly in curricular settings. In this paper we review several examples of hackathons as a teaching tool in engineering design education and provide a qualitative evaluation on their effectiveness. We further discuss the educational potential and limitations of hackathons and identify several related research directions in engineering design education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Canadian Design Workshop (CDW) is a new biennial workshop - held in partnership with the Clive L. Dym Mudd Design Workshop - that aims to investigate and share information on design education and research unique to Canadian institutions, focusing on elevating engineering design education and research within the Canadian context. The Canadian engineering education and research landscapes presently share commonalities and important differences from the landscape typically explored during the Clive L. Dym Mudd Design Workshops. This paper discusses the logistics of running the inaugural workshop (CDW 1), including challenges and opportunities afforded by the virtual offering. A thematic analysis of the presentations and ensuing discussions during the workshop reveals a number of recurring themes across all sessions, including transdisciplinarity, sustainability, the design studio pedagogy, teaching of design in the "middle years" of engineering programs, and challenges in design education. The paper concludes with a reflection on the first offering of the workshop and implications for the future of CDW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent implementations of design review meetings in engineering design courses encourage student peers to provide feedback, in addition to the course instructor and industry client. The purpose of this investigation was to compare feedback provided by students and course instructors and to determine how student peers' feedback related to their own performance in the design course. We collected verbal feedback comments provided by the instructor and student peers in twelve design review meetings of a management engineering capstone design course. A total of 553 comments were coded along two dimensions: topic (design, project management, or communication) and function (comprehension, evaluation, or recommendation). Comments falling in the comprehension function were also further coded using an existing questiontype typology. A comparison of instructor and student feedback revealed that the instructor provided not only more feedback than individual students, but also distributed it better across the different topics and functions. Specifically, the instructor provides more feedback in the topics of design, communication and project management and is more likely to provide direct assessments and recommendations to student teams. Stronger student teams (i.e., those with better design outcomes) generally provide more feedback to their peers. Findings can help instructors promote better feedback-giving for themselves and students alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peer review of design progress and artifacts is not very common in engineering design education. Yet, the broader educational literature suggests that the impact of peer (novice) review can be superior to instructor (expert) only review in various ways. This paper describes a systematic implementation of face-to-face peer review in progress update meetings (PU Ms) of a management engineering capstone design series of courses. In biweekly PU Ms the instructors met jointly with two teams at a time, paired based on topic similarity. Teams took turns presenting to and critiquing each other's presentations and design progress. The format was well-received by students and was successful in increasing the diversity and wealth of knowledge teams could draw from during the meetings. A student survey revealed that students perceived that the regular joint PU Ms encouraged them to maintain a steady progress in their design projects, facilitated peer-to-peer sharing of ideas, and were instrumental in helping teams improve on how they communicated their designs by providing multiple opportunities for revisions and refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]