A Cornerstone Design Module in First Year Engineering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes a new five-week cornerstone design module at the conclusion of first year engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC).The objective of this cornerstone module is to bringtogether the multiple course themes—developed over the preceding six modules and 18 academic weeks—into a single, integrative and culminating experience. The module builds on the previous course topics, andspecifically emphasizes design, stakeholder consultation, prototyping, sustainability, and communication in a unified project experience. Through a mix of analytical and physical prototyping, teams design a pilot rainwater harvester system for small, remote communities. Teams specify the system components in their design, and submit those through an online form. All systems are then simulated off-line in a detailed MATLAB model that tracks weather, physical performance, cost, maintenance, healthand safety risks, and more. The culminating event for the module is a formal oral presentation followed by a timelapse video of the simulations of the different teams’ rainwater harvester system designs.The outcomes to the module have been very positive.The module has successfully run for three years with over 400 teams. Feedback through surveys shows students find the cornerstone project meaningful and helpful in developing their ability to use simulation and numerical modelling in design. Students have also rated the module highly in terms of the relevance to their degree, and the importance of the learning outcomes to engineers.Primary challenges noted to date include inequities instudent workload within a team, due to shifting priorities as final exams approach, and ability to update the project each year to maintain a new challenge for each cohort.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.125 | 0.057 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".