Honors College Thesis
 

From DNA to Deep Space : Investigating scale communication in multidisciplinary engineering projects

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/honors_college_theses/8p58pg01w

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  • An important goal of engineering educators is to prepare students to interact and communicate with other professionals, especially other engineers. Object and process scale is a crucial concept that engineers are required to communicate frequently and effectively. The goal of this study is to characterize how engineers communicate scale within a multidisciplinary design project. This was accomplished by studying a group of NASA engineers presenting a 90% design review of the BioSentinel project, a cube satellite designed to measure radiation in deep space using yeast. The engineers’ presentations were observed and data was gathered in the form of field notes, which were analyzed using Systemic Functional Linguistics. The engineers did not frequently use precise values or describe value desirability. Scales were explained very rarely, using personification or comparisons to other scales. Overall, these findings indicate that practicing engineers assume a high level of scale understanding from their peers, which means that engineering educators must provide students with a thorough understanding of scale and the various methods of communicating it. Key Words: Scale, Engineering education, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Observational Study
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  • This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1361107 and No. 1642022.
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