The engineering problem appeared straightforward at first glance. A manufacturer faced pressure to redesign an x-ray cassette that technicians found too heavy to handle. Any solution had to reduce weight, work with existing equipment, and avoid increasing radiation exposure.
The breakdown
The constraints were familiar to professional engineers, but to undergraduate engineering students, they were much harder to manage. The course used work-authentic problems rather than simplified classroom exercises to expose students to the kinds of tradeoffs engineers face in practice. As teams worked through the scenario, however, a pattern became clear. Students focused on single changes, such as making the cassette thinner, instead of thinking through how one decision affected the rest. This raised a design question about the problem itself: how explicitly those tradeoffs needed to be explained for learners who were not yet able to identify them on their own.
The reframing
The design team decided against stripping complexity from the problem and focused instead on reshaping how students engaged with it. The course design no longer assumed that students could identify and weigh tradeoffs on their own. Instead, it made those moments of judgment explicit. The goal was not to make the problem easier, but to make the decisions clearer.
The team restructured the problem as a scenario centered on a fictional engineering group responsible for the redesign. One character was tasked with leading the effort, while others raised questions, challenged assumptions, and responded with competing priorities. Through this exchange, the problem modeled how experienced engineers identify constraints, weigh tradeoffs, and move a decision forward. Students were asked to step into that line of reasoning, using the same criteria to compare material options and justify their choices.
The problem remained authentically complex, with all of its constraints intact. What changed was that students could no longer avoid the tradeoffs those constraints created. The redesign did not ask novices to think like experts. It required them to begin thinking past rules and formulas and confront the kinds of decisions engineers actually make.
