Use of Different Prototype Modalities for Design Communication in Industry-Sponsored, Interdisciplinary Capstone Design Teams during COVID-19*

Students’ participation in a culminating engineering design experience is an important element of many undergraduate engineering programs. A typical outcome of this experience is for students to communicate a clear understanding of the design problem and associated constraints, describe their design process, and illustrate that their final design meets its requirements. Effective communication skills are an influential factor for success and are considered a critical learning objective for capstone engineering courses. Even though visual media such as sketches and prototypes are an essential means of communication, little work has been done analyzing their use in students’ design communication. In this study, we seek to identify and compare prototype usage of different modalities among student design teams. Data was collected from approximately 8-minute video presentations that served as a final deliverable in an interdisciplinary capstone course during the 2019–2020 academic year, which was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prototypes shown in the videos were classified by prototype category and the duration of prototypes presented in each video was recorded. We sought to understand how prototype usage varied between teams who were given awards from panels of judges and to identify patterns in prototyping among teams with different compositions of student majors. The results indicated that a larger proportion of prototypes were displayed by awarded teams compared to teams who did not win an award. Several differences in digital and physical prototype usage were seen among engineering disciplines. Across all teams, a higher use of digital prototypes was identified when compared to physical prototypes. Mechanical teams showed the highest proportion of physical prototypes, while interdisciplinary and chemical engineering teams showed the least. This study contributes to the understanding of visual artifacts and prototypes as means of communication (especially virtual communication) and provides guidance for student designers for effective demonstration of engineering projects.