Design meetings and design notebooks as tools for reflection in the engineering design course

Engineering design courses are fundamental components of undergraduate programs. Students in these courses solve realistic design problems in an "authentic" setting. But do these adapted professional activities serve a more important pedagogical role than increasing authenticity? In this paper, we investigate this question by describing an ethnographic study of Biomedical Engineering (BME) 201, an engineering design course for sophomores at a large Midwestern university. We examine two activities for their pedagogical significance: the weekly design meeting and the student design notebook. We show how these activities develop both practical skills and reflective thinking of professional engineering