Experience the Relevance of Testing in Engineering Design Education

Engineering design education imparts students how to Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate complex engineering systems. Testing is an important phase within these activities to increase the reliability of the engineered systems. The „Innovation Project“ at ETH Zurich is a project-based engineering design class, where 456 undergraduate students of mechanical engineering experience the most relevant phases of the product development process. The project work includes the production of several prototypes with direct manufacturing technologies and the implementation of the final system in a defined operation environment. A main finding of the study is that systems being tested at different stages of the product development process showed higher reliability and better performance in the final contest. As a consequence, the learning effects of testing have considerable impact on the projects’ success. This paper shows how the relevance of testing can be experienced in project-based engineering design education focusing on the study of the “Innovation Project” where testing is approached in three of the four C-D-I-O activities: (1) Testing in Design, (2) Testing in Implementation and (3) Testing in Operation. Testing in Design enables the students to identify errors such as part collisions primarily in the context of Computer Aided Design. Testing the Implementation refers to testing the assembly of the parts. Finally, Testing for Operation is conducted by integrating the system in the intended overall system. Based on the results, it is discussed how the relevance of testing can be experienced and imparted in project based engineering design classes.

Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014