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Abstract
Engineering design instruction can be fraught with financial and physical constraints. Growing class sizes have further exacerbated the problems, with lecturers being unable to provide students with the kind of individualised and timely feedback required for the learning process. The use of Adaptive Tutorials in the field of engineering design can help to alleviate these problems, by providing students with an interactive, positive experience, where they are able to practice their problem solving techniques at their own pace, whilst being guided by the adaptive feedback loops. Survey data from 562 undergraduate students participating in one of six engineering design adaptive tutorials shows that almost half the students prefer this teaching method to traditional written assignment, and well over half the students would like to see adaptive tutorials implemented in other courses. Furthermore, the use of the Welding Design Adaptive Tutorial lead to statistically significant improvements in the final mean marks for the course, t(313) = 4.657, p < .001. This pilot study has shown promising results, but more research is required to investigate whether adaptive tutorials can help establish a long-term solution to the current issues in Engineering Design education.
