Mentoring freshmen through design

This paper describes how the design courses at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) are being restructured to help faculty better mentor students through their early design experience. Alumni praise the courses for improving their open-ended problem solving, team-work and oral communications skills. However, many students get through the sequence without advancing in these skills much at all. One indication of this is the large number of graduating seniors who are still operating only in the middle levels of Perry´s intellectual development scale. Our approach to improving students learning in design is to have more concerted, more deliberate and better mentoring of students by faculty in the design courses. This requires an altered course structure to facilitate mentoring and a training of faculty in what to look for in student actions and in how to interact with student teams. We have begun this past semester with our first-year design course by making three significant changes: one professor has only 25 students and is with them five hours per week; the design projects for first-year students are mechanical devices (e.g., the ASEE Design Graphics Competition problems) whose work-up requires student teams to produce something they see as engineering: a portfolio of drawings and a prototype; and we have regular meetings/workshops of the professors where they discuss their mentoring experiences and hear ideas from outside experts. The paper gives the reasoning behind each change and presents initial data assessing the value of this new approach to teaching first-year design.