Designing and Implementing Open-Ended Modeling Problems (OEMPs) in Engineering Science Courses

Abstract

The current undergraduate engineering curriculum comprises many engineering science courses, which are courses such as statics and dynamics that focus on foundational concepts and mathematical formulas. In these courses, students are typically assigned closed-ended textbook problems that have a single correct answer. These are nothing like what professional engineers see in industry, which are contextualized, ill-structured, open-ended problems. Our research has focused on addressing this gap between engineering education and industry by implementing what we call Open-Ended Modeling Problems (OEMPs) into math-heavy undergraduate engineering science courses. OEMPs ask students to develop models of real world systems, requiring many assumptions and simplifications to be made along the way. They are designed to expose students to the open-endedness of real engineering and elicit the productive beginnings of engineering judgment, which is akin to intuition about the development and use of mathematical models. We have implemented OEMPs into various classes across seven universities so far, with student survey results showing both enjoyment and belief of improved engineering knowledge. In hopes of making OEMPs more easily accessible for instructor use, this poster presents a generalized how-to guide for the proper creation, scaffolding, and implementation of them into courses. Through evidence-based recommendations and an example problem along the way, instructors should be able to assign their own OEMPs without as much hassle as what normally comes with open-ended problems.