Abstract
With the recent increased concern about the design and problem solving needs of U.S. industry, and academia’s inability to address them, there has arisen a desire to incorporate open-ended problems in engineering education. In the initial stages most, if not all, real-world engineering problems are ill-defined, and have several acceptable solutions, i.e. they are open ended. Yet, our students get very little practice in finding solutions for this type of problem. Correcting this weakness in engineering curricula is hampered by misconceptions about, and inexperience with, these types of problems. As a consequence, educators often attempt to modify typical well defined example problems by expanding their scope, but still taking care to insure that the solution domains are closely circumscribed and well defined. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the main features of open-ended problems and their utility in design education. Such problems are characterized by incomplete or inconsistent information, no evident solution strategy, non-unique solutions, and often poorly understood goals. A real-world open ended design problem will be contrasted with its’ typical engineering education counterpart. This paper attempts to provide the necessary insights to aid in the formulation and selection of effective open ended problems for use in engineering education.
