Where do Students Learn about Engineering Design?

While prior work indicates that seniors near the end of their capstone design course know more about design than first-year students, it is unclear where this knowledge is gained. We study three possible sources of seniors´ greater design knowledge: sophomore and junior courses, industrial experience, and the senior capstone course. The design process knowledge of seniors at the beginning of their capstone class was assessed and information about their industrial experience obtained. The results indicate that industrial experience greatly increases students´ recognition that documentation needs to occur throughout a design process and decreases their recognition that idea generation is an important part of design. For most aspects of design assessed, however, seniors with experience show no greater knowledge than first-year students. Furthermore, seniors without industrial experience scored no differently than first-year students, indicating that analysis-heavy sophomore and junior classes do not impact design process knowledge