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Abstract Product dissection is a popular educational tool in engineering design due to its ability to help students understand a product, provide inspiration for new design ideas, and aid in product redesign. While prior research has investigated how dissecting a product before idea generation impacts the creative output of the ideation session, these studies failed to look at the types of ideas generated before dissection or how the type of product dissected impacts this. Thus, the goal of the current study was to examine how product dissection impacts the solution space explored by students. Fifty-five undergraduate engineering students participated in the experiment; 40 participants virtually dissected a product, while the remaining 15 completed a personality test. The results of the study highlight that students explored new types of ideas during the second ideation session for all conditions and at all levels, with students having the biggest increase in embodiment variety when they dissected analogically far products. Overall, there were no differences in design variety between students in the dissection condition and the incubation condition. This study highlights how incubation can impact design variety and calls for further investigation of the interaction between product dissection and incubation.
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Do Students Want to Dissect?: A Survey of Student Opinions on the Use of Product Dissection in the Classroom
Abstract Product dissection has the ability to create an engaging and active learning environment for engineering students. The purpose of this paper was to further investigate students’ perceptions on product dissection in the classroom. This paper was developed to provide an examination of the usefulness of product dissection for idea generation and how product dissection modules might aid in students’ understanding of the module. The findings of this paper conclude that students felt that the product dissection module was useful, valuable, and enjoyable and that students had a positive sentiment towards the designed aspects of the dissection module. Through the use of content analysis, areas for improvement in these modules are identified.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1463009
- PAR ID:
- 10128813
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Do Students Want to Dissect?: A Survey of Student Opinions on the Use of Product Dissection in the Classroom
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2019-97569
