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The purpose of product dissection is to teach students how a product works and provide them with inspiration for new ideas. However, little is known about how variations in dissection activities impact creative outcomes or engineering self-efficacy (ESE) and creative self-efficacies (CSE). This is important since the goal of engineering education is to produce capable and creative engineers. The current study was, thus, developed to address this research gap through a factorial experiment. The results showed that idea development was not impacted by dissection conditions but that ESE and CSE were increased through these activities. The results also showed that higher levels of CSE and ESE had alternate effects on novel idea development indicating they are at odds in engineering education.
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Dissection Versus Incubation: The Within-Subject Effects of Product Dissection Activities on Design Variety
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1463009
- PAR ID:
- 10128815
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Mechanical Design
- Volume:
- 142
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1050-0472
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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One of the challenges of studying synaptic structure and function is accessibility. Some of the earliest readily identifiable and accessible synapses were from the frog and various arthropods. To address questions regarding mechanisms that underlie synaptic development and function, genetically tractable systems were required, and researchers turned to theDrosophila melanogasterembryonic/larval neuromuscular preparation.Drosophilaembryos are transparent and can be labeled with antibodies or probes and imaged in whole-mount preparation for structural analysis. Embryos can also be dissected to visualize the entire body wall musculature as well as finer details including live protein trafficking and protein–protein interactions. Whereas younger dissected embryos can be mounted directly onto charged slides, more mature embryos and larvae develop a cuticle that impedes this adherence, so different techniques must be applied. In this protocol, we detail how to manufacture dissection tools and collect embryos, and discuss the individual steps of dissecting late-stage embryos, early first-instar larvae, and late-stage third-instar larvae.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4043584
