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1. Integration of Art Pedagogy in Engineering Graduate Education

   Tovar, A. (March 2018, ASEE Illinois-Indiana Section Conference)

   The integration of STEM with the Arts, commonly referred to as STEAM, recognizes the need for human skill, creativity, and imagination in technological innovations and solutions of real-world technical problems. The STEAM paradigm changes the dominant “chalk and talk” lecture and “closed-ended” problem-solving orientation of traditional engineering pedagogy to a hands-on, studio-based, and open-ended creative learning approach, typical in art education. A growing body of literature has provided evidence of the favorable impact of situating STEAM in K-16 education. The long-term objective of this work is to promote creativity in engineering students by integrating learning methods and environments from the Arts into graduate STEM education. To this end, an integrating engineering, technology and art (ETA) educational model is developed and is currently being tested. This ETA educational model systematically merges technical instruction with studio-based pedagogy. The ETA model consists of three courses, which were piloted in the year 2017. In each course, engineering and art instructors and students collaborated for 15 weeks on design projects. These projects ranged from drones to architectural installations. 

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2. Reflections of Undergraduate Engineering Students Completing a Cross-Disciplinary Robotics Project with Preservice Teachers and Fifth Graders in an Electromechanical Systems Course

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47929  

   Kaipa, Krishnanand; Kidd, Jennifer; Kumi, Isaac; Ringleb, Stacie; Ayala, Orlando; Gutierrez, Kristie; Pazos, Pilar; Cima, Francisco; Rhemer, Danielle (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   Abstract. Engineering is becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary, requiring students to develop skills in multiple engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical engineering students having to learn the basics of electronics, instrumentation, and coding) and interprofessional skills to integrate perspectives from people outside their field. In the workplace, engineering teams are frequently multidisciplinary, and often, people from outside of engineering are part of the team that brings a product to market. Additionally, teams are often diverse in age, race, gender, and in other areas. Teams that creatively utilize the contrasting perspectives and ideas arising from these differences can positively affect team performance and generate solutions effective for a broader range of users. These trends suggest that engineering education can benefit from having engineering students work on team projects that involve a blend of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations. An NSF-funded project set out to explore this idea by partnering undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a 300-level electromechanical systems course with preservice teachers enrolled in a 400-level educational technology course to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. Working in small teams, students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired robots. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird Bit hardware (Birdbrain Technologies, Pittsburgh, PA) (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process, and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots. Additionally, each engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their education student and fifth-grade partners. This paper reports on the reflections of the engineering students after completing a cross-disciplinary robotics project with preservice teachers and fifth graders with the goals of (1) assessing the suitability of the project to the specific course, (2) analyzing the nature of the balance between course and project workload/objectives, (3) benefits and challenges of participating in the project, and (4) evaluating the overall effectiveness of the intervention. Student reflections collected at the conclusion of the semester from implementations in Spring 2022 and Spring 2023 were analyzed for this study. Findings from a thematic qualitative analysis of the reflections revealed benefits such as students’ perceived gains in coding skills, reinforcement of engineering concepts learned in class, acquisition of interprofessional skills (e.g., communication with technical and non-technical audiences, cross-disciplinary collaboration), and engineering-pedagogical skills such as lesson planning and classroom management. Students also reflected on opportunities to incorporate creative design insights when brainstorming with non-engineers. Students’ perceived challenges were mainly related to workload, time management, course organization, and teaching/interacting with the fifth graders. These findings provide insightful suggestions for future interventions in undergraduate engineering courses. 

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3. Reflections of Undergraduate Engineering Students Completing a Cross-Disciplinary Robotics Project with Pre-Service Teachers and Fifth Graders in an Electromechanical Systems Course.

   Kaipa, K; Kidd, J; Kumi, I; Ringleb, S; Ayala, O; Gutierrez, K; Pazos, P; Cima, F; Rhemer, D (June 2024, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Engineering is becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary, requiring students to develop skills in multiple engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical engineering students having to learn the basics of electronics, instrumentation, and coding) and interprofessional skills to integrate perspectives from people outside their field. In the workplace, engineering teams are frequently multidisciplinary, and often, people from outside of engineering are part of the team that brings a product to market. Additionally, teams are often diverse in age, race, gender, and in other areas. Teams that creatively utilize the contrasting perspectives and ideas arising from these differences can positively affect team performance and generate solutions effective for a broader range of users. These trends suggest that engineering education can benefit from having engineering students work on team projects that involve a blend of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations. An NSF-funded project set out to explore this idea by partnering undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a 300-level electromechanical systems course with preservice teachers enrolled in a 400-level educational technology course to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. Working in small teams, students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired robots. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird Bit hardware (Birdbrain Technologies, Pittsburgh, PA) (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process, and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots. Additionally, each engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their education student and fifth-grade partners. 

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4. What Factors Impact Psychological Safety in Engineering Student Teams? A Mixed-Method Longitudinal Investigation

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4055434  

   Cole, Courtney; O’Connell, Abigail; Gong, Zibing; Jablokow, Kathryn; Mohammad, Susan; Ritter, Sarah; Heininger, Katie; Marhefka, Jacqueline; Miller, Scarlett R. (December 2022, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Abstract Although teamwork is being integrated throughout engineering education because of the perceived benefits of teams, the construct of psychological safety has been largely ignored in engineering research. This omission is unfortunate because psychological safety reflects collective perceptions about how comfortable team members feel in sharing their perspectives, and it has been found to positively impact team performance in samples outside of engineering. While prior research has indicated that psychological safety is positively related to team performance and outcomes, research related to psychological safety in engineering teams is less established. There is also a lack of comprehensive methodologies that capture the dynamic changes that occur throughout the design process and at each time point. In light of this, the goal of the current study was to understand how psychological safety might be measured practically and reliably in engineering student teams over time. In addition, we sought to identify factors that impact the building and waning of psychological safety in these teams over time. This was accomplished through a study with 260 engineering students in 68 teams in a first-year engineering design class. The psychological safety of the teams was captured for each team over five time points over the course of a semester long design project. The results of this study provide some of the first evidence on the reliability of psychological safety in engineering teams and offer insights as to how to support and improve psychological safety. 

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5. Work in Progress: Teaching Engineering Students to Self-Transform: Parallelisms between Product Innovation and Student Career Path Planning

   Vargas_Hernandez, Noe; Ortega, Javier; Lozano, Karen; Fuentes, Arturo; Marquez, Eleazar (June 2024, ASEE Conference)

   Freshman engineering students can have a hard time transitioning to college. The freshman year is critical to the students’ academic success; in this year they learn basic skills and establish essential networks with other students, faculty, and resources. How can we help these freshman engineering students in this transition? We propose that freshman students can learn from the engineering design innovation process and apply it by analogy to the design of their academic pathways. There are multiple similarities between product innovation (i.e., technology) and the continuous academic challenges faced by the student. Engineers as designers and innovators have a vast and rich repository of techniques, tools, and approaches to develop new technologies, and a parallelism can be drawn between the design and innovation of a technology (e.g., redesign of a kitchen appliance), and the “design” of the students’ academic career pathways. During the Spring 2023 semester pilot, students in Intro to Mechanical Engineering (Course A) worked in teams in a 6-week product innovation project to redesign a simple kitchen appliance. Students learned basic concepts of the design process (e.g., creative exploration of solutions, decision making, multi objective evaluation, etc.). These same students concurrently took Course B (Learning Frameworks) where they worked on a 6-week project to define their career pathways. Both projects, product innovation and career pathways, followed the Challenge Based Instruction (CBI) approach. Periodically, participant students were shown how to use the lessons from product innovation by analogy and reflection in their career pathways project. The objective is for students to learn about the engineering design process and to apply it to their academic challenges by analogy. This prepares students with meta skills to help solve future problems in their academic path, and at each iteration, the students transform themselves, hence the use of the term self-transformation (also referred as “self-innovation”). Data collected from pre and post surveys will be presented to measure self-efficacy in engineering design, grit, motivation to learn, and STEM identity. Participant interviews provide a qualitative insight into the intervention. This project is funded by NSF award 2225247. 

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