How can a Shoe Design Challenge better implement engineering concepts?

Question

I work for a non-profit pre-engineering education company that provides an after school program to teach students the basic principles of engineering. We currently have a challenge involving shoe design that I have been asked to improve so that it better conveys engineering concepts and can be scorable at the competition day. Currently, the challenge provides essentially no engineering concepts. Currently students are given a box of materials (like foam and string) and asked to make shoes. Proposals should be scorable with a rubric, preferably.

Answer 1

Designing a shoe is as much of a engineering task as doing anything else. Just because there are all sorts of other designers nowadays does not mean that shoes are not engineering worthy.

Optimization makes nearly any task engineering worthy. Simple one dimensional goal such as weight, cost etc is easy to score. Engineering is not just about easy optimisations so some more complex is better. Some theories put engineering into the crossfire of contradictory parameters. So if you ask simultaneously cost, weight, waterproofness etc then it's even more engineeringly.

Another engineering thing is documentation, manufacturability and repeatability. After all there's not much point in engineering a solution if the solution will just be forgotten and cannot be improved upon, or worse cannot be built. So perhaps the students may build a prototype but get graded for a "production" version built by a third party based on the specification. (I have used this strategy and it works well)

Finally engineering is also about the process. So how they do things is as important as what you achieve. For this you could specify goals that have to be solved before you can go forward...

And so on..

Answer 2

First, designing a shoe absolutely is engineering.

Second, there is no simple way to measure the "goodness" of a shoe. If there were, there'd be only one model of shoe out there. You therefore have to define a set of criteria to which the shoes will be measured. This lets the kids know what to aim at, and you a way of scoring their results.

You could score based on a "cost" system, for example. You already give them each the same set of materials to work with. Put a cost on each item. For example, each inch of string costs 1 unit, each square inch of foam 10 units, etc. Then you add other costs that are really measures of how well different criteria are met. For example, each gram of final mass might cost one unit, failure of a puncture test of the sole might cost 50 units.

However, overall I don't like the shoe concept since there are way too many criteria for goodness in ordinary life, and many of them difficult to measure, highly subjective, or emotional. I would pick something different in the first place. For example, give them a box of materials as you do now, but tell them they need to build a bridge that will span two tables. You could score this based on cost of material, but also measure performance by what maximum load the bridge can sustain over a fixed defined span, how wide a span for a fixed defined load, etc. The materials could be as simple as a few boxes of wooden toothpicks, a bottle of Elmer's glue, and 3 sheets of copier paper, for example. Or simply specify they can use as many of whatever common brand of wooden toothpicks are available in your area, but the final weight will be part of the scoring.

There are many many options. You don't need to pick one that will make it difficult for the kids to know what to do and for you to measure the results.