Unit 6 exposes students to the application of engineering principles and practices to reverse engineer a consumer product. Reverse engineering involves disassembling and analyzing a product or system to understand and document the visual, functional, and/or structural aspects of its design. In this unit students have the opportunity to assess all three aspects of a product’s design. Students learn the visual design elements and principles and their application in design. They perform a functional analysis to hypothesize the overall function and sequential operations of the product’s component parts and assess the inputs and outputs of the process(es) involved in the operation of the product. Students physically disassemble the product to document the constituent parts, their properties, and their interaction and operation. After carefully documenting these visual, functional, and structural aspects of the product, students assess the strengths and weaknesses of the product and the manufacturing process by which it was produced.
Source: PLTW
Source: PLTW