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1. Cross-functional Team Course Design Project in Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34358  

   Fila, Nicholas; Rover, Diane; Mina, Mani; Jones, Phillip (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   This work-in-progress research paper explores the intersection of cross-functional teamwork and design thinking within the course design process through collaborative autoethnography. Collaborative autoethnography uses individual and dialogic reflections to provide a detailed and nuanced exploration of experiences within a culture (e.g., a course design team) and generate insights that might inform broader community of individuals who experience related cultures. In this study, we investigate how individual educators attempt to shape and are shaped by a unique team course design process in electrical and computer engineering. The participant-researchers in this study are three electrical and computer engineering faculty members and one engineering education researcher who have participated in a six-semester-long course redesign effort. The effort has emphasized building and utilizing a new cross-functional team approach, imbued with design thinking strategies, to support improved professional formation and student-centeredness within an embedded systems course for electrical and computer engineering students. In this study, data collection and analysis were integrated and iterative. This process engaged cycles of setting writing prompts, individual writing, group discussion and reflection, and setting new writing prompts. This process was repeated as participant-researchers and the team as a whole refined their insights, explored emergent topics, and connected their observations to external research and scholarship. The autoethnographic process is ongoing, but five themes have emerged that describe key features of the team course design process and experience: (1) uncertainty, (2) navigating the team, (3) navigating the self, (4) navigating the system, and (5) process. The paper features a collection of participant-researcher reflections related to these emergent themes. 

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2. Design Educators’ Conceptions of Prototyping in Engineering Design Courses

   Ali, Hadi; Lande, Micah (June 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This is a research study that investigates the range of conceptions of prototyping in engineering design courses through exploring the conceptions and implementations from the instructors’ perspective. Prototyping is certainly an activity central to engineering design. The context of prototyping to support engineering education and practice has a range of implementations in an undergraduate engineering curriculum, from first-year engineering to capstone engineering design experiences. Understanding faculty conceptions’ of the reason, purpose, and place of prototyping can help illustrate how teaching and learning of the engineering design process is realistically implemented across a curriculum and how students are prepared for work practice. We seek to understand, and consequently improve, engineering design teaching and learning, through transformations of practice that are based on engineering education research. In this exploratory study, we interviewed three faculty members who teach engineering design in project-based learning courses across the curriculum of an undergraduate engineering program. This builds on related work done by the authors that previously investigated undergraduate engineering students’ conceptions of prototyping activities and process. With our instructor participants, a similar interview protocol was followed through semi-structured qualitative interviews. Data analysis has been undertaken through an emerging thematic analysis of these interview transcripts. Early findings characterize the focus on teaching the design process; the kind of feedback that the educators provide on students’ prototypes; students’ behavior while working on design projects; and educators’ perspectives on the design course. Understanding faculty conceptions with students’ conceptions of prototyping can shed light on the efficacy of using prototyping as an authentic experience in design teaching and learning. In project-based learning courses, particular issues of authenticity and assessment are under consideration, especially across the curriculum. More specifically, “proportions of problems” inform “problem solving” as one of the key characteristics in design thinking, teaching and learning. More attention to prototyping as part of the study of problem-solving processes can be useful to enhance understanding of the impact of instructional design. Challenges for teaching engineering design exist, and may be due to difficulties in framing design problems, recognizing what expertise students possess, and assessing their expertise to help them reach their goals, all at an appropriate place and ambiguity with student learning goals. Initial findings show that prototyping activities can help students become more reflective on their design. Scaffolded activities in prototyping can support self-regulated learning by students. The range of support and facilities, such as campus makerspaces, may also help students and instructors alike develop industry-ready engineering students. 

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3. Adding a “Design Thread” to Electrical and Computer Engineering Degree Programs: Motivation, Implementation, and Evaluation

   Cheville, R. A.; Thompson, M. S.; Thomas, S. (July 2021, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   null (Ed.)

   This article details the multi-year process of adding a “design thread” to our department’s electrical and computer engineering curricula. We use the conception of a “thread” to mean a sequence of courses that extend unbroken across each year of the undergraduate curriculum. The design thread includes a project-based introduction to the discipline course in the first year, a course in the second year focusing on measurement and fabrication, a course in the third year to frame technical problems in societal challenges, and culminates with our two-semester, client-driven fourth-year capstone design sequence. The impetus to create a design thread arose from preparation for an ABET visit where we identified a need for more “systems thinking” within the curriculum, particularly system decomposition and modularity; difficulty in having students make engineering evaluations of systems based on data; and students’ difficulty transferring skills in testing, measurement, and evaluation from in-class lab scenarios to more independent work on projects. We also noted that when working in teams, students operated more collectively than collaboratively. In other words, rather than using task division and specialization to carry out larger projects, students addressed all problems collectively as a group. This paper discusses the process through which faculty developed a shared conception of design to enable coherent changes to courses in the four year sequence and the political and practical compromises needed to create the design thread. To develop a shared conception of design faculty explored several frameworks that emphasized multiple aspects of design. Course changes based on elements of these frameworks included introducing design representations such as block diagrams to promote systems thinking in the first year and consistently utilizing representations throughout the remainder of the four year sequence. Emphasizing modularity through representations also enabled introducing aspects of collaborative teamwork. While students are introduced broadly to elements of the design framework in their first year, later years emphasize particular aspects. The second year course focuses on skills in fabrication and performance measurement while the third year course emphasizes problem context and users, in an iterative design process. The client-based senior capstone experience integrates all seven aspects of our framework. On the political and organizational side implementing the design thread required major content changes in the department’s introductory course, and freeing up six credit-hour equivalents, one and a half courses, in the curriculum. The paper discusses how the ABET process enabled these discussions to occur, other curricular changes needed to enable the design thread to be implemented, and methods which enabled the two degree programs to align faculty motivation, distribute the workload, and understand the impact the curricular changes had on student learning. 

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4. An Exploration of Course Design Heuristics Identified from Design Meetings, Design Artifacts, and Educator Interviews

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--32060  

   Fila, Nicholas; McKIlligan, Seda (June 2019, 2019 ASEE Annual Conference)

   This research paper investigates differences between course design heuristics that have been identified from three distinct data sources: course design team meetings, educator interviews, and course design papers. The study of heuristics used by experts in a discipline can have several practical benefits. They can (1) be employed as tools to scaffold expert behavior among novices, (2) be translated into processes to make challenging tasks more efficient, and (3) provide deeper insights into the nature of a domain, task, or discipline. While the study of heuristics remains robust across domains, they have demonstrated differences in format and have been identified through a variety of data types. The purpose of this study is to unpack differences in heuristics independently identified through different data types in order to better understand the role these types of data can play in understanding of heuristics for course design, especially as related to engineering courses. We utilized thematic analysis to explore the patterns of differences between heuristics identified from the three settings in three related, but distinct studies. Datasets includes audio-recordings from a four-month team course redesign process, five approximately hour-long educator interviews, and 183 peer-reviewed course design papers. We identified four themes representing differences across the datasets: (1) differences in volume/frequency of heuristics, (2) differences in breadth, specificity, and conceptualizations evidenced by categories of heuristics, (3) individual heuristic specificity, and (4) locus of clarity in heuristic examples. These results inform a set of four considerations for selecting data sources for studies of heuristics within engineering course design and other domains. 

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5. Design by Thread: The E4USA Engineering for Us All Curriculum

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE44824.2020.9274008  

   Reid, Kenneth J.; Ladeji-Osias, Jumoke Oluwakemi; Beauchamp, Cheryl; Dalal, Medha; Griesinger, Tina; Eagle, W. Ethan (January 2020, Proceedings of 2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   null (Ed.)

   In the past decade, reports such as the National Academies' "Engineering in K-12 Education: Understanding the Status and Improving the Prospects" (2009) have discussed the importance of – and challenges of – effectively incorporating engineering concepts into the K-12 curriculum. Multiple reports have echoed and further elaborated on the need to effectively and authentically introduce engineering within K-12; not just to address a perpetual shortage of engineers, but to increase technological literacy within the U.S. The NSF-funded initiative Engineering for US All (E4USA): A National Pilot Program for High School Engineering Course and Database curriculum was intentionally designed ‘for us all;’ in other words, the design is meant to be inclusive and to engage in an examination and exploration of ‘engineering’. The intent behind the ‘for us all’ curriculum is to emphasize the idea of thinking like an engineer, rather than simply to develop more engineers. Therefore, the focus is not on ‘how to become an engineer’ but ‘what is an engineer’ and ‘who is an engineer’. This paper will discuss the design of the first iteration of the curriculum. The initial design was based on the First Year Engineering Classification Scheme, used to classify all possible content found in first-year, multidisciplinary Introduction to Engineering courses in general-admit (non direct-admit) engineering programs. The curriculum provides progressively larger engineering design experiences relating to student fields of interest and real-world problems. Course objectives are broken into four major threads. Each of these threads is woven through seven modules. The threads are: Discovering Engineering, Engineering in Society, Engineering Professional Skills, and Engineering Design. This paper will discuss the design of the first iteration of the curriculum. The initial design was based on the First Year Engineering Classification Scheme, used to classify all possible content found in first-year, multidisciplinary Introduction to Engineering courses in general-admit (non direct-admit) engineering programs. The curriculum provides progressively larger engineering design experiences relating to student fields of interest and real-world problems. Course objectives are broken into four major threads. Each of these threads is woven through seven modules. The threads are: Discovering Engineering, Engineering in Society, Engineering Professional Skills, and Engineering Design. 

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