Project Documentation

Maintaining a documentation of your progress is an important part of the engineering design process. It can help you see how your project evolves over its duration, provide a space for you and your teammates track work done asynchronously or separately, and even be evidence of intellectual property.

In this class, you will practice these organizational and reflective skills by maintaining a Google Drive folder that contains all of your project files, a group engineering notebook, and a project schedule. Our section instructors will check your documentation for completion throughout the semester, particularly at Benchmarks.

Google Drive Folder Setup

At the beginning of the semester, we will create a Google Drive folder for your team to document all of the work on their project. This folder will be shared with your section instructors. Once the link is shared with you, please add the link to this folder the EG Website Submission section in the Professional Development tab by the due date of the Milestone 1 presentation. This folder will contain a Google Doc for your engineering notebook, your project schedule, and all other files used for your SLDP. It is your space for collaboration.

Engineering Notebook Guide

As engineers, a record of your work must be shown clearly to your employers and supervisors. As a student working on a long-term engineering project, you are expected to do the same. A notebook will be a valuable source of reference when developing our portfolio, the final presentation, the final report, tracking changes throughout the semester, or attributing credit to who was responsible for contributions to the project. If you wish to continue development of your ideas your engineering notebook can be used to claim ownership of the intellectual property developed during the project.

Please refer to our template and a checklist for what you should include. Our instructors will refer to this checklist at Benchmarks and can refer to this document at any point during the semester.

At Milestones, you will also complete in-class assignments that should be completed in your engineering notebooks designed for you to reflect on your design thinking processes:

• Exercise 1: Defining a Design Challenge (IDEO, 2012).

• Exercise 2: Creating a Engineering Design Canvas (Kline et al., 2017).

• Exercise 3: Pitching a Design (Heilmeier, 2022).

References

IDEO. (2012). Toolkit – Design Thinking for Educators. https://page.ideo.com/design-thinking-edu-toolkit

Kline, W., Schindel, W., Tranquillo, J., Bernal, A., & Hixson, C. (2017). Development of a design canvas with application to first-year and capstone design courses. https://peer.asee.org/development-of-a-design-canvas-with-application-to-first-year-and-capstone-design-courses

G.H.Heilmeier, “The Heilmeier Catechism” [Online], Available: https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/heilmeier-catechism