The benefits of model building in teaching engineering design

Using verbal protocol analysis, we report how model building has the potential to aid engineering students in solving a design task. From our analysis of 8 students in varying engineering disciplines, we found that physical construction of a model during an open-ended design task helped students generate and evaluate ideas, better visualize their ideas, and helped students uncover differences between real behavior and the conceptual model used to predict that behavior. Model building also enhanced creative thinking and helped students become more aware of their own meta-cognitive design strategies. We also found that, regardless of when they began sketching or building, the process was fairly similar in length for most of these students.