What Can You Learn About Systems Engineering by Building a Lego™ Car?. Issue 1 (16th August 2018) - Hahn, Heidi Ann
Abstract: Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL's) Future Female Leaders in Engineering (FFLIE) Program brings female engineering undergraduate students to the Laboratory for summer internships, which include a technical work assignment and a specialized eight‐week long professional development course. During their first year, FFLIE students receive training on LANL's Mission Assurance (MA) Program, which involves the integrated application of systems engineering (SE), project management (PM), and engineering quality and rigor (QA) to ensure mission success. The instruction is organized around the system development project life cycle and emphasizes activities and artifacts associated with the various life cycle phases. A home improvement project (adapted from Braakhuis, Janssen, Koudenburg, de Liefde, Malotaux, Rens, and Stevenson, 2010) is used in a series of table‐top exercises throughout to illustrate various points. The training culminates with a project – building a car for a Lego™ Derby race – on which the students exercise the skills they have just learned in the classroom instruction. This paper briefly reviews the instructional content, with an emphasis on the activities and artifacts exercised in the Derby project; provides lessons learned; and concludes that there's a lot one can learn about SE by building a Lego™ Derby car if the experience is properly structured! Overviews of FFLIE students' learnings about requirements, measures of performance, trade studies, and verification and validation are provided.