Keynote Speaker 3
| Session | Keynote 3 |
| Date | Thursday, 17 July 2014 / 09:00 – 10:00 hrs |
| Topic | Challenging Disciplines: Cross-Course Projects to Do Engineering |
| Presenter | Prof. Kevin Otto, Singapore University of Technology and Design |
Biography
Kevin Otto is an Associate Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. His expertise lies in innovation, robust design, robotics, smart buildings, and future technology market planning. Prof. Otto has consulted extensively on a wide variety of complex system design, such as aircraft air management systems, low-energy building systems and medical devices. Generally, he provides expertise on innovation, helping companies project the future value stream and competitive landscape, as well as change scenarios, the impact of radical new technologies, stakeholder decision modeling, adoption forecasting, and technology roadmaps. He also provides expertise to radically improve development processes by leverage modeling and analysis, modularity, portfolio planning, requirements, and robustness and reliability. Improvements of 2 to 10 times on delivery and quality are typical. Prof. Otto is a Fellow of the ASME, on the Design Society Board, and has received numerous awards including the R&D 100 Award for one of the 100 most innovative products. He is author of “Product Design,” a book that presents the tools and techniques needed to execute and institute an innovative design culture: voice of the customer, benchmarking, architecture, modeling, statistics, and experimentation are all covered from a design-engineering viewpoint. He has also written many peer-reviewed academic journal articles.
Abstract
Problems faced by engineers today are characterized by ever more complex multidisciplinary issues. Yet, it is often difficult to demonstrate multidisciplinary engineering problems in the undergraduate curriculum, particularly in the early Freshman and Sophomore years, since the students have not enrolled in a breadth of subjects. Multidisciplinary topicsarereserved to latter years, and so students are unclear how course subjects relate to one another and fit together in engineering design as a whole. This keynote will discuss new approaches to integrate multiple course materials early in the Freshman and Sophomore years. This includes approaches such as multiple concurrent courses simultaneously attacking a common design problem. For example, one approach taken was for one dedicated week, concurrent courses stopping coursework and instead simultaneously worked on a challenge problem engaging the subject matter of the courses. Another approach is for this to be worked on in staggered courses term to term, where the challenge problem is engaged in parts each term. We found the cross-disciplinary challenge problem approach generated highly effective learning on the multidisciplinary nature of design problems, including statistically significant impact on student perceptions of their ability to solve multidisciplinary design problems. As an example, courses in biology, thermodynamics, differential equations, and software with controls were merged in a design challenge problem of developing a perishable food delivery system composed of unrefrigerated unmanned ground vehicles. Experiences and outcomes of such early multidisciplinary challenge problems will be explored.
