This study explores the influence that an educational intervention has on students generating requirements for a design task. An experiment was performed in a fourth-year mechanical engineering design course by giving the participants a design problem from which they had to generate a list of requirements. A lecture on requirements was given and then the students were given a second problem. The two problems were tested for similarity. The data was evaluated using ideation metrics of variety, novelty, and quantity adapted to this study. Variety was assessed using eighteen categories to classify each requirement. Novelty was evaluated on the level of uniqueness of the requirement against the complete set generated, based on both syntax and semantic filtering. Findings suggest that the lecture had a positive impact on the students in increasing the variety of the requirement. All novel requirements belonged to the activity performed after lecture. Finally, the quantity of the requirements generated after the lecture were found to be statistically significantly higher. It is shown through a second study that the students before the lecture performed similarly to practicing engineers with three or more years of experience. This suggests that using undergraduate students in the final year of their program may be adequate as surrogates for engineering practitioners for requirement identification studies. This is an important methodological contribution for the engineering design research community to justify the use of students as participants in experimental studies.

本研究探讨了教育干预对学生产生设计任务要求的影响。在四年级的机械工程设计课程中进行了一项实验，向参与者提供一个设计问题，他们必须从中生成一份需求列表。进行了有关要求的讲座，然后向学生提出了第二个问题。测试了两个问题的相似性。使用适合本研究的多样性、新颖性和数量的构思指标来评估数据。使用十八个类别来评估多样性，对每个要求进行分类。新颖性是根据语法和语义过滤，根据生成的完整需求集的独特性水平进行评估的。研究结果表明，讲座对学生增加要求的多样性产生了积极的影响。所有新颖的要求都属于讲座后进行的活动。最后，发现讲座后产生的需求数量在统计上明显更高。第二项研究表明，讲座前的学生表现与具有三年或以上经验的执业工程师相似。这表明，使用课程最后一年的本科生可能足以作为工程从业人员的代理人进行需求识别研究。这是工程设计研究界在方法论上的一个重要贡献，证明了使用学生作为实验研究参与者的合理性。