Best engineering design process steps?

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC
1

For this year’s season, my team has decided to use a design process that uses 9 steps.

  1. Define the problem - overview and problem explanation
  2. Brainstorm ideas - initial ideas and drawings
  3. Research - research outside things that could help us
  4. Develop ideas - finalized ideas (such as CADs) and designs to be chosen
  5. Choose the best idea - decision matrix and choosing the final idea
  6. Build and prototype - creating the solution/finalized idea
  7. Test and Evaluate - testing the solution and its performance
  8. Make improvements - improve on the solution based on testing
  9. Communicate results - communicate and show the results such as tournament reflections
    We chose this many steps as we think it covers most of what is expected and goes beyond. We were wondering if this was better or worse than the standard 5 step engineering design process that other teams use. Additionally, our notebook is color-coded and it is very easy to tell what each page corresponds to in the process.
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Cool!

I base my engineering design process word-for-word from the notebook criteria. It helps make grading the notebook easier, because the judge doesn’t have to try to connect the dots and mix-match my design process. But your way works too!

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Great! Our team probably focused more on Communicating and Collaboration. We also had everything that we did in our notebook (Powerpoint) and in a log (Excel).