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Academic bridge courses are implemented to impact students’ academic success by revising fundamental concepts and skills necessary to successfully complete discipline-specific courses. The bridge courses are often short (one to three weeks) and highly dense in content (commonly mathematics or math-related applications). With the support of the NSF-funded (DUE - Division of Undergraduate Education) STEM Center at Sam Houston State University (SHSU), we designed a course for upcoming engineering majors (i.e., first-year students and transfer students) that consists of a two-week-long pre-semester course organized into two main sessions. The first sessions (delivered in the mornings) were synchronous activities focused on strengthening student academic preparedness and socio-academic integration and fostering networking leading to a strong STEM learning community. The second sessions (delivered in the afternoons) were asynchronous activities focused on discipline-specific content knowledge in engineering. The engineering concepts were organized via eight learning modules covering basic math operations, applied trigonometry, functions in engineering, applied physics, introduction to statics and Microsoft Excel, and engineering economics and its applied decision. All materials in the course were designed by engineering faculty (from the chair of the department to assistant professors and lecturers in engineering) and one educational research faculty (from the department of chemistry). The course design process started with a literature review on engineering bridge courses to understand prior work, followed by surveying current engineering faculty to propose goals for the course. The designed team met weekly after setting the course goals over two semesters. The design process was initiated with backward design principles (i.e., start with the course goals, then the assessments, end with the learning activities) and continued with ongoing revision. The work herein presents this new engineering bridge course’s goals, strategy, and design process. Preliminary student outcomes will be discussed based on the course’s first implementation during summer 2021.
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Navigating Process-Product Tensions using a Design Canvas
National surveys of design courses find many similarities between the way capstone courses are structured and implemented, although more programs focus on the design process rather than creating a product. What is not as well understood are the methods and techniques used to inform students of interrelationship between product and process. This paper discusses the use of multiple formal design representations as a means to focus learning on the interrelation between design processes and products. The ability to utilize multiple representations has been demonstrated to be effective in improving student learning in math education, a discipline that can be highly process-oriented. Similarly representational fluency impacts engineering modeling. In the context of teaching design the term representation here refers to a written or graphical expression of some aspect of the design process and/or product. Ideally the set of representations would form a minimal and complete orthonormal basis set; that is the ensemble of representations captures the design in its entirety and the representations are not redundant. Since the design work of many engineers is a set of plans or diagrams (forms of representation) the complete set of representations has the potential to capture both the process of design and serve as a product of design work. Over a four year period a set of representations was developed and trialed in a year-long senior capstone course in electrical and computer engineering at a small, private liberal arts institution. Using an iterative, action research approach that included student input a set of representations was developed by modifying or eliminating ineffective representations and introducing new formats based on analysis of the students’ response and success. To minimize redundancy and work towards completeness (i.e. a lean, 360° view of the process and product) representations were organized using a “design canvas” modeled after the Business Model Canvas. The Design Canvas classifies representations by actionable questions on two axes—system development and design choices— which in turn are organized hierarchically by scale. Results of the project and examples of representations for the current iteration of the Design Canvas are presented along with the Design Canvas development process.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1640706
- PAR ID:
- 10062693
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings
- ISSN:
- 2153-5868
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 21101
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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