At Virginia Tech, our first-year engineering program is typically spread across a two-semester course sequence: ENGE 1215 in the Fall and ENGE 1216 in the Spring. 

In our first course in the sequence, ENGE 1215, the lessons and assignments focus on exploring the engineering disciplines and their contributions to current products and processes and fundamental programming knowledge and skills. Along with this content we also spend a significant amount of time (about 5 weeks) teaching students to scope engineering problems. We define problem scoping as identifying all relevant problem stakeholders, ethical implications, and the societal issues and impacts (economical, environmental, social, etc.) of the problem and its past or current solutions. We ask students to consider the problem system holistically rather than just considering a problem in an isolated bubble. Students often struggle with these lessons, activities, and assessments, as they often so strongly-identify as problem-solvers that they quickly begin solving the problem rather than taking the time to scope the problem completely.

Problem-solving through engineering design is intentionally delayed to the following semester in ENGE 1216 where students are taught the engineering design process and complete a semester-long engineering design project with a team of peers while simultaneously learning fundamental CAD knowledge and skills. 

Given the challenge of students eagerly jumping to the ideation and design of problem solutions without spending the time and attention required to properly scope the problem, I created a project using EM and the 3-Cs as a framework to scaffold students’ problem scoping through lessons and activities that lead to smaller assignments and formative feedback that ultimately culminates in a final deliverable that visually represents a fully scoped design problem.

In general, students will need access to reliable sources of information to support the claims they make as they scope a design problem (e.g., library databases, internet search engines, etc.) 

Specific to the final deliverable in the virtual version of this project, students should be informed of various online software or websites that they can use to create their final visual map of the problem system that they scoped. 

These can include options like:

• Adobe (Illustrator, Photoshop Sketch, Photoshop, etc.) 
• Canva 
• Microsoft / Google Suite (PowerPoint, Google Slides, etc.) 
• Lucidspark, Mural, Miro, etc. 

To address the concern of first-year engineering students struggling to fully scope their engineering problems thoughtfully and understand the complex systems that the problems they hope to solve exist within, I created a project using EM and the 3-Cs as a framework to scaffold the problem scoping knowledge and skill development. Through various lessons, in-class activities/discussions, and three smaller assignments that were used to give each student group formative feedback as they progressively scoped their problems, students were able to more completely articulate the complex system that surrounds their problem and visually show how various solutions may impact multiple aspects of that system. The final deliverable for this project is a complex problem map and a student-led tour of that map. 

This project was designed for student teams of 4-6 students in a virtual version of the ENGE 1215 course. This project (lessons, activities, assignments) is designed to be spread out over 5 different 75-minutes lessons and a 6th 75-minute class for teams to collaborate on their final deliverable together during class time. Within VT’s first-year program course model and curriculum, this equates to about three weeks in a standard 15-week academic semester.  

The five primary lessons were taught on the following topics:  

• Lesson 1: Complex Problem Scoping in Engineering Design 
• Lesson 2: Problem-Solving Teams, Systems, and Stakeholders 
• Lesson 3: Engineering Professional & Ethical Responsibilities 
• Lesson 4: Engineering Projects and Resource Allocation & Awareness 
• Lesson 5: Engineering Solutions that Create Value and How 
  
  

These lessons were all supplemented with in-class activities and in-class discussions to help students deeply understand the problems they hoped to develop solutions for and how those solutions are connected to various aspects of society and don’t exist in isolation. 

The first three lessons focused primarily on engaging and demonstrating curiosity as students were asked to think about a small-scale problem they’d like to learn more about, and be curious about who all may be related to their problem and how. The fourth lesson shifts to making connections by having students articulate connections between various aspects of the problem and what forms those connections might take (influence, power, supply chain of resources and materials, flow of money/funding, etc.). In the fifth lesson we transition to “Creating Value” as students are then asked to begin to think about their complex problem and its related system through the lens of value creation. For example, asking them how value has already been created within this system and challenging them to find opportunities for additional value creation.