Putting the horse before the cart - Fitting a new project into established design and writing pedagogy

Project-based learning has been an important aspect of the Rowan University College of Engineering curriculum since its inception in 1996 1 .In the fall of the sophomore year, engineering students take a multidisciplinary, integrated, project-based course that is designed to teach both design and technical writing.Recently, significant changes were made to the course by introducing a more systematic approach to design instruction than used previously, and by adopting a stronger "write-to-learn" component to both formal and informal writing assignments built around a main project that had been run for several years before.These changes have been shown to result in measurable improvements in team's design performances, course evaluations, and subsequent design reports 2 .However, an additional benefit of the approach was realized in the fall 2008 semester, when a long standing design project was replaced with a new project.In earlier offerings, developing a new project meant completely rewriting assignments, and a risk that the scope of the project would be inappropriate.By the fall 2008, aspects of the course such as scope of the project, design lectures and writing assignments had evolved to support clearly stated objectives for both design and technical writing.The result of these changes was that it was relatively straightforward to define a reasonable scope for the design challenge, and the new writing assignments required only minimal changes in the details.This paper briefly discusses the instructional framework and course objectives for both design instruction and technical writing, compares and contrasts the old and new projects and gives examples from writing assignments and grading rubrics that demonstrate how the instructional framework facilitated developing the new project and corresponding instructional materials.