Incorporating Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering Concepts in Undergraduate Engineering Courses
Abstract
The context in which the US Navy operates is becoming increasingly complexwith advances in communications, artificial intelligence, and autonomousvehicles. With the continuously increasing complexity of Navy-relevantproducts and systems comes a corresponding need for engineers with systemsthinking and systems engineering skills. While some universities, includingthe Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), have developed formal systemsengineering graduate and/or undergraduate programs, the fact remains thatthe vast majority of engineering graduates come from traditional engineeringdisciplines such as mechanical engineering. There have been several recentefforts to introduce basic systems thinking and systems engineering conceptsinto the conventional undergraduate engineering curriculum. By introducing aholistic view of engineering design, these efforts have attempted to reachstudents before reductionist thinking habits have crystalized. The workcorresponding to this proposal aims to expand on a specific project thatproduced interventions targeting a conventional sophomore-level productdesign and development course for mechanical engineering students at theSouth Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSM&T). The new project willbuild on that prior work by (1) extending the effort to incorporate systemsthinking and systems engineering concepts to both lower and higher-levelclasses, reaching freshman and senior mechanical engineering students, (2)expanding the initial work conducted at SDSM&T to reach Carnegie MellonUniversity (CMU) and to incorporate the vast systems engineering expertiseavailable at NPS, and (3) revising and improving the Systems Thinking SkillsSurvey (STSS), a tool developed in the prior work to measure students???systems thinking skills. The main project deliverables encompass educational materials and learningactivities that can be used to teach introductory systems thinking andsystems engineering concepts in a freshman level introduction to mechanicalengineering course, a small number of short case studies that can be used ina capstone senior design course to help students learn how systems thinkingand systems engineering concepts are applied in product design, and animproved STSS that can be used to gauge the benefits of the proposedinterventions in the systems thinking skills of the participants. Theexperiences gained during the implementations that will take place at SDSM&Tand CMU, together with the results obtained from the analysis of the datacollected with the STSS, will serve as a stepping stone towards the longterm goal of gradually incorporating systems thinking and systemsengineering throughout the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculumto produce graduates with the competencies needed to meet the designchallenges that they will face when joining the workforce, including theones that they will encounter if they work in the development of Navysystems. To increase the impact of the project, the educational materialsdeveloped as part of this effort will be disseminated using a web site tomake them available to faculty members interested to adopt them in theircourses.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 04, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812733
Entities
People
- Karim Muci-kuchler
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
- United States Navy