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In its fifth year, the Architectural Engineering Design Days challenge at the University of Waterloo (UW) returned to a fully in-person format in 2022. The event has evolved after being online in 2020 and hybrid online/in-person in 2021. For the first time last year, instructors have integrated a second phase of the design challenge into a studio course. The two-phased version of the challenge has provided an opportunity for the authors to study the student work developed before instruction, and the influence of design critiques and feedback on the results of the second phase. The Design Days challenge for 2022 was for students in groups of 4 to design a piece of outdoor furniture for a given site on campus. Student teams were tasked with building a full-scale working mock-up of their design using limited supplies. At the end of a 48-hour design sprint early in the term, student teams presented their mock-ups to panels of professors and industry guests to receive feedback. One month later, the project was reintroduced to the same groups of students, but this time integrated into a design studio course. As part of the introduction to the second phase of the design challenge, the instructor presented a lecture on universal design. Students received two weeks of design development time, and two sessions of instructor and TA (Teaching Assistants) feedback to advance their design during the second phase. The final products of the second phase included updates to the original concepts in terms of design and construction, but also considerations of diversity in user experience. In this paper, the authors review the improvements made to the Design Days Challenge as it returns to an all in-person event. Also included is an overview of the perceived advances in project results from phase 1 to phase 2 from the course instructors. Most importantly, the results of a student survey will share the students' reflections on the modifications they made to their projects based on the receipt of feedback and course instruction during phase 2 of the Design Days challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equity has been newly introduced as an outcome that needs to be addressed and assessed in undergraduate engineering programs in North America. In Canada, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board has been emphasizing that equity and ethics be embedded in the curriculum through their accreditation visits. This required several programs within our institution to work on methods that can be included to make students more aware of equity issues and assess their understanding on the above subjects. This paper discusses how courses were changed to include equity as part of the curriculum. Equity discussions were focused through the introduction of universal design as applied in building design-making students experience first-hand what the implications of design choices are on a diverse (age, physical / cognitive ability, race, gender) user group. Three different first year engineering groups were assessed in their knowledge of equity. Group 1 was the group that were prompted with a presentation in class about the different aspects of requirements for building design to address mobility issues followed by an audio recording prompting the students to do a tour on campus and experience first-hand these effects. The second group has done a campus tour without the audio and have been exposed to only the presentation in class. The third group is the control group who has only done the campus tour with no prompts and did not have the presentation. All three groups were assessed later in their knowledge of equity issues in building designs. This paper will share these findings and the details of what the students were exposed to in the three different groups. It also discusses recommendations for future changes that could be done to better include equity discussions and assessments in the curriculum. The paper also states how this could be modified for any undergraduate program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]