MAKING CONFIDENT DESIGNERS: EFFECT OF A DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING COURSE AND GENDER DIFFERENCES IN STUDENTS' ENGINEERING DESIGN SELF-EFFICACY

Prototypes serve multiple purposes in design such as communication, learning and decision-making. In fact, designers often perform multiple cycles of prototyping, testing and design refinement. Yet, design and prototyping processes are often taught in separate courses in the engineering curriculum, as a result of which students may not learn how to leverage the power of prototypes in thinking, learning and refining the design. This may limit their experience of design and negatively impact their self-efficacy for design. In this paper, we report on a field quasi-experiment comparing an integrated design and prototyping course with a separate design and prototyping course sequence in terms of students' engineering design and innovation self-efficacy at the end of the course/sequence, and gender differences in self-efficacy. We found that participants in the integrated course showed higher self-efficacy for design, and also that there were differences in self-efficacy between the genders with males reporting higher self-efficacy than females. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for the engineering curriculum and the way design is taught.