Developing a measure of quality for engineering design artifacts

Design is recognized as a key engineering activity, and engineering is a fundamental part of science education at the K-12 level. However, it is difficult to assess student designs when the range of 'correct' answers is wide. Feedback in the form of assessment helps students learn from a design activity and can direct students along the pathway of improvement. The purpose of this paper is to develop an assessment protocol to measure solution quality taking into account both objective and subjective design criteria (e.g. measurements of cost/energy used along with aesthetics). Three protocols are developed by analyzing and comparing 109 high school students' design solutions to a zero-energy home design task. Lessons learned from the first two approaches informed the third approach that highlights the importance of balancing trade-offs. Results suggest the Trade-off Value approach provides an intuitive and accurate way to understand how well a designer has balanced both complementary and competing design criteria. These results can be used as feedback to support a systems design process and to evaluate the relationship between design quality and design behavior.