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1. 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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2. Investigating a Socially Engaged Design Process Model

   Dugan, K.E.; Daly, S.R.; Michaels, C.; Skerlos, S.J.; Verhey-Henke, A. (January 2022, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Conference)

   Educators can leverage a variety of process models to scaffold students from beginning designer practices to practices aligned with more experienced designers. The Center for Socially Engaged Design at the University of Michigan developed a Socially Engaged Design (SED) Process Model to explicitly emphasize important aspects of design that are often underemphasized or not included in commonly-used design process model visualizations, including, for example, designers embracing the limitations of their own perspective and acknowledging the power they hold, the benefits of integrating contextual considerations, and the use of prototypes throughout a design process rather than as single phase in a design process. To better understand the role of design process models, broadly, and the perceived value of process models that emphasize the importance of people and context in design work, specifically, we investigated upper-level mechanical engineering students' perceptions of this SED Process Model’s visualization. Our findings from this initial exploratory study showed both variability and several consistent themes in participants’ perceptions, for example, there were several interpretations of relationships between different aspects of the model, iteration in design was salient to all participants, and while this SED Process Model’s visualization does have recommendations, several participants noted it does not specify exactly how to achieve those recommendations. Understanding engineering students’ perceptions of this SED Process Model’s visualization can help us (1) iterate on the process model’s visualization and (2) better understand how to leverage multiple process model visualizations in engineering curricula. 

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3. Board 421: Using Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Challenges Coupled with Career Exploration to Develop an Engineering Identity in Low-Income Students

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47011  

   Castles, Ricky; Venters, Chris (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   East Carolina University (ECU) was funded by a multi-institutional Track 3 S-STEM Grant #1930497 in January 2020. The funds from this grant have been used to recruit and support three cohorts of students at ECU and three partnering community colleges. The project is referred to internally as the PIRATES project for Providing Inclusive Residential and Transfer Engineering Support. In addition to funding scholarships, the research aim of this project uses Lee and Matusovich’s Model of Co-Curricular Support for Undergraduate Engineering Students [1] to study best practices in co-curricular support for both students who start their pathway towards an engineering degree at a university and students whose higher education academic pathway began at a community college. Major goals of the project include building a sense of belonging and an engineering identity among students both within and across cohorts and institutions. One of the ways that this project has worked to encourage student retention and persistence in engineering is through engineering design challenges coupled with related presentations from speakers working in a variety of engineering careers. The goals of these events are to showcase the many opportunities engineering students have and the many ways that engineers work to solve local and global issues by having students engage in small engineering projects that can be completed in one day and showcasing how those projects relate to a broader field of engineering. The projects extend the experiences students have in various engineering courses and labs and introduce some technical skills that students may not develop in traditional classrooms and lab courses. This paper will highlight the design problems posed to students during single-day design activities in which students from all cohorts and participating institutions were invited to work in teams to tackle design challenges. Student teams were purposefully assigned to get students working together who attend different institutions and are in different graduating classes to create mentoring opportunities for less experienced students to learn from more experienced students. Emphasis is also placed on how students were introduced to career opportunities related to the design challenges by recruiting alumni from the partnering institutions to speak on the work they do and how their educational pathways prepared them for diverse careers. This paper will also discuss survey and focus group interview data from students participating in these activities to showcase how the activities may have helped to expand their knowledge of opportunities available to engineers in a variety of fields. 

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4. A Comparative Analysis of Student Perceptions of Recommendations for Engagement in Design Processes

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4064671  

   Dugan, Kelley E; Daly, Shanna R (October 2024, Journal of Mechanical Design)

   Engineering designers are tasked with complex problems necessitating the use and development of various supports for navigating complexity. Prescriptive design process models are one such tool. However, little research has explored how engineering designers perceive these models' recommendations for engagement in design work. In this exploratory study, we analyzed data from individual semi-structured interviews with 18 mechanical engineering students to identify participant perceptions of design process models. As many design process model visualizations lack explicit attention to some social and contextual dimensions, we sought to compare perceptions among two models drawn from engineering texts and one model that was developed with the intent to emphasize social and contextual dimensions. We identified perceptions of the recommendations from the design process models related to starting and moving through a design process, gathering information, prototyping, evaluating or testing, and what they should consider. Participant perceptions across the three process models suggest different design process models make perceptions of certain recommendations more salient than others. However, participant perceptions also varied for the same process model. We suggest several implications for design education and training based on participant perceptions of the process models, particularly the importance of leveraging multiple design process models. The comprehensive descriptions of participant perceptions provide a foundation for further investigations bridging designers' perceptions to intent, behavior, and, ultimately, design outcomes. 

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5. Case study on engineering design intervention in physics laboratories

   Kaufman-Ortiz, K.; Morphew, J. W.; Rebello, N. S.; & Rebello, C. M. (January 2022, 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings)

   Problem-solving is a critical skill in the workplace, but recent college graduates are often deficient in problem-solving skills. Introductory STEM courses present engineering students with well-structured problems with single-path solutions that do not prepare students with the problem-solving skills they will need to solve complex problems within authentic engineering contexts. When presented with complex problems in authentic contexts, engineering students find it difficult to transfer the scientific knowledge learned in their STEM courses to solve these integrated and ill structured problems. By integrating physics laboratories with engineering design problems, students are taught to apply physics principles to solve ill-structured and complex engineering problems. The integration of engineering design processes to physics labs is meant to help students transfer physics learning to engineering problems, as well as to transfer the design skills learned in their engineering courses to the physics lab. We hypothesize this integration will help students become better problem solvers when they go out to industry after graduation. The purpose of this study is to examine how students transfer their understanding of physics concepts to solve ill-structured engineering problems by means of an engineering design project in a physics laboratory. We use a case-study methodology to examine two cases and analyze the cases using a lens of co-regulated learning and transfer between physics and engineering contexts. Observations were conducted using transfer lenses. That is, we observed groups during the physics labs for evidence of transfer. The research question for this study was, to what extent do students relate physics concepts with concepts from other materials (classes) through an engineering design project incorporated in a physics laboratory? Teams were observed over the course of 6 weeks as they completed the second design challenge. The cases presented in this study were selected using observations from the lab instructors of the team’s work in the first design project. Two teams, one who performed well, and one that performed poorly, were selected to be observed to provide insight on how students use physics concepts to engage in the design process. The second design challenge asked students to design an eco-friendly way of delivering packages of food to an island located in the middle of the river, which is home to critically endangered species. They are given constraints that the solution cannot disrupt the habitat in any way, nor can the animals come into contact directly with humans or loud noises. Preliminary results indicate that both teams successfully demonstrated transfer between physics and engineering contexts, and integrated physics concepts from multiple labs to complete the design project. Teams that struggle seem to be less connected with the design process at the beginning of the project and are less organized. In contrast, teams that are successful demonstrate greater co-regulated learning (communication, reflection, etc.) and focus on making connections between the physics concepts and principles of engineering design from their engineering course work. 

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