Teaching engineering students how to design a Proof-of-Concept: a way to experience the value of reflexive practices for engineers?

Abstract

Industrial companies expect engineers to take an external and critical look at their activities through reflexive practices. Recognising the criticality of reflexivity, Project Based Learning approaches include assignments for students to implement reflexive approaches on their projects. However, it remains unclear in the literature whether those assignments help the students experience the value of reflexive practices or if students consider them as academic exercises. In this concept paper, we present a new teaching module that intends to make students experience the value of reflexive practices for engineers. In this module, an industrial partner asks a group of master engineering students to design and implement a Proof-of-Concept (POC) to help the company explore an innovation field. This eight-week project is mainly conducted within the company. Teachers act both as coaches through regular meetings and as experts through lectures focusing on specific engineering reasoning (statistics, modelling, simulation, design of experiments...) that are necessary to design a robust POC. At the end of the module, students present conclusions drawn from their POC to the company which explain to students the next steps envisioned from their contribution. The module is two years old : so far, the authors supervised twelve students split into four industrial projects. Feedback for both companies and students were collected, as well as the lectures and the final presentations. Based on these, we conducted a preliminary analysis that suggests that students experience the value of reflexive practices for engineering work during the module.