SYSTEMATIC IDEATION CURRICULUM EFFECTIVENESS INVESTIGATION DEPLOYMENT TO ENHANCE DESIGN LEARNING

摘要

This paper presents our current research on the effectiveness of TRIZ, emphasis on sketching and technology enabled sketching in improving the ideation performance of undergraduate engineering students in classroom settings. This research also investigates the impact of TRIZ and two other conditions, emphasis on sketching and the Pulse Smartpen, for their impact on the ideation performance and provide understanding into the mechanisms by which they operate to this end. Our objective is to test our hypotheses that TRIZ, sketching, or the pulse Smartpen improve design ideation alone or in some combination. To this end, we defined experimental design and protocols to study design and ideation tools, and thereby, provide a standard way to benchmark tool effectiveness. This research work involves rigorous experimental designs to collect quantitative and qualitative data to answer the following three research questions. 1. Can TRIZ improve the ideation performance of engineering students? 2. Can sketching improve the ideation performance of engineering students? 3. Can technology enabled journaling (via Pulse Smartpen) improve the ideation performance of engineering students? The treatment conditions are applied to classes of engineering students from different backgrounds and different institutions. Partial results are presented for this work in progress supported by NSF (0920446 and 0920707).