An assessment technique to evaluate engineering projects of schoolchildren competition

The paper describes the assessment technique to evaluate the novelty and practical usefulness of higher school students’ technical projects. Such technical projects are carried out at technical competitions and olympiads, including polytechnic and technological Olympiads, “Step into the Future” and “I am a Researcher” competitions. Current assessment systems are based on a set of criteria equal in value, so the aspects of the projects having different importance for the project are assessed as if they were equally important. Analyzing the literature, we have not found the differential scales of evaluation. Therefore, it was important to develop such a technique that would enable to assess the novelty and practical applicability of the project. We offered to assess technical projects using Altshuller’s table originally developed to evaluate inventor’s tasks. The main criteria of this table are: the degree the idea is elaborated, the degree of novelty. As a result, all project ideas can be fitted into relevant 5x5 table. The additional criteria we added to the technique were completeness of the idea elaboration, literature analyzes, prototype analysis, idea development, practical applicability, quality and adequacy of schemas and drawings. This method was tested at Russian multidisciplinary engineer Olympiad “Future of Russia”. The Olympiad was organized by the Ministry of Education and Science of Russian Federation and by South Ural State University. The technical projects were divided into the following sections: aircraft and missile-spacecraft systems; machine building; shipbuilding; material technology and nuclear power engineering industry. The technique offered allowed to estimate and range about 170 projects in restricted time, identifying the most innovative ones. The technique is universal, allows to differentiate projects, pragmatic, aimed to reveal creativity and innovative ideas of schoolchildren.