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1. Biologically Inspired Design: High School Students' Engagement in BID Integrated Learning in Engineering Classrooms

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342982  

   Rehmat, Abeera P; Alemdar, Meltem; Helms, Micheal; Baptiste-Porter, Dyanne; Rosen, Jeffery; Weissburg, Marc (October 2023, Applied Electronics)

   NA (Ed.)

   This Research paper explores the activities within the biologically inspired design-focused engineering curriculum to determine if they fostered students’ engagement in learning. This work builds on concurrent research exploring students' application of BID in engineering and teachers’ implementation of BID within their respective engineering classrooms. Participants comprised ninth-grade high school students (n=12) enrolled in the first-year engineering course across two high schools. Qualitative content analysis was conducted on classroom observation field notes, student focus groups, teacher curriculum enactment surveys, and teacher interviews. The finding revealed that student engagement varied across the seven-week-long unit. In the initial week, engagement was relatively low since the activities were static and required learning to be scaffolded via worksheets. However, during weeks three through six, engagement positively shifted due to the activities being more dynamic, requiring students to engage in inquiry and design learning. Furthermore, students’ academic engagement was fostered due to hands-on experiences and workbased authentic problems presented in the unit, which encouraged collaboration. 

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2. Full Paper: Where’s the Math? A Case for Reconsidering Math in K-12 Engineering

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--44831  

   France, Todd; Roepke, Tena; Katterle, Karli; Chaker, Dua (July 2023, ASEE Conferences: 14th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience (FYEE) Conference)

   Prior evidence suggests that active, student-centered learning environments can positively influence students’ perceptions of STEM career pathways, and that engineering activities can provide motivational contexts for learning math concepts. However, specific benefits to student proficiency in mathematics via engineering design activities are less well established, with some studies pointing to greater student improvement in mathematical practices than content comprehension. Previous studies also note that math standards can be effectively aligned with hands-on activities, but obstacles may include a lack of teacher confidence with engineering concepts and student aversion of math during engineering activities. This paper details an investigation of the prevalence of mathematics in middle school and high school engineering, particularly with regards to a study of thirty popular activities on the virtual library Teach Engineering. Results show that standards-based math content is clearly integrated into most of the reviewed activities, with math tasks comprising about one-third of the total activity time on average. Notably, the math tasks occur almost exclusively during (e.g., measuring) or after (e.g., plotting data) the hands-on phase of each activity; in other words, math was not used to inform design decisions or make predictions. The study suggests that more readily deployable engineering curricula that utilize math at the front-end of activities may be needed for better integration of all STEM disciplines and to more authentically demonstrate the utility of mathematics in the engineering field. 

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3. PhD Student Funding Patterns: Placing Biomedical, Biological, and Biosystems Engineering in the Context of Engineering Sub-disciplines, Biological Sciences, and Other STEM Disciplines

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-024-00142-w  

   Knight, David B; Grote, Dustin M; Kinoshita, Timothy J; Borrego, Maura (July 2024, Biomedical Engineering Education)

   Abstract Whether doctoral students are funded primarily by fellowships, research assistantships, or teaching assistantships impacts their degree completion, time to degree, learning outcomes, and short- and long-term career outcomes. Variations in funding patterns have been studied at the broad field level but not comparing engineering sub-disciplines. We addressed two research questions: How do PhD student funding mechanisms vary across engineering sub-disciplines? And how does variation in funding mechanisms across engineering sub-disciplines map onto the larger STEM disciplinary landscape? We analyzed 103,373 engineering and computing responses to the U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates collected between 2007 and 2016. We conducted analysis of variance with Bonferroni post hoc comparisons to examine variation in funding across sub-disciplines. Then, we conducted a k-means cluster analysis on percentage variables for fellowship, research, and teaching assistantship funding mechanism with STEM sub-discipline as the unit of analysis. A statistically significantly greater percentage of biomedical/biological engineering doctoral students were funded via a fellowship, compared to every other engineering sub-discipline. Consequently, biomedical/biological engineering had significantly lower proportions of students supported via research and teaching assistantships than nearly all other engineering sub-disciplines. We identified five clusters. The majority of engineering sub-disciplines grouped together into a cluster with high research assistantships and low teaching assistantships. Biomedical/biological engineering clustered in the high fellowships grouping with most other biological sciences but no other engineering sub-disciplines. Biomedical/biological engineering behaves much more like biological and life sciences in utilizing fellowships to fund graduate students, far more than other engineering sub-disciplines. Our study provides further evidence of the prevalence of fellowships in life sciences and how it stretches into biomedical/biological engineering. The majority of engineering sub-disciplines relied more on research assistantships to fund graduate study. The lack of uniformity provides an opportunity to diversify student experiences during their graduate programs but also necessitates an awareness to the advantages and disadvantages that different funding portfolios can bestow on students. 

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4. Biologically Inspired Design For High School Engineering Students (Work in Progress)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--42371  

   Alemdar, Meltem; Baptiste_Porter, Dyanne; Rehmat, Abeera; Helms, Michael; Towner, Alexandra; Moore, Roxanne; Rosen, Jeffrey; Varnedoe, Julia; Weissburg, Marc (June 2023, ASEE Conferences)

   NA (Ed.)

   Biologically inspired design (BID) has gained attention in undergraduate and graduate engineering programs throughout the United States, and more post-secondary institutions are beginning to implement it into their engineering curriculum [1], [2]. However, little has been done to introduce BID concepts more formally into the K-12 curriculum. Consequently, a research study funded by the National Science Foundation focused on developing a BID integrated engineering curriculum for high school students. The curriculum is designed to integrate BID into the engineering design process (EDP) by leveraging analogical design tools that facilitate a transfer of biological strategies to design challenges. This enables students to understand both the engineering problem and the biological system that could be used to inspire design solutions. In this paper, we describe students’ application of BID integration in the engineering design process and their experiences utilizing BID as they solve design challenges. The curriculum was pilot tested in two 9th grade engineering classrooms across two schools during Spring 2022. Data was collected from four groups of students (n=12) enrolled in the engineering courses across two schools. The study includes classroom observations, student artifacts, and student focus groups. We utilized qualitative content analysis, a descriptive approach to analyzing student data [3], [4], to uncover the meaning and presence of text, messages, images, and transcriptions of dialogues [4]. In this study, we aim to capture the evidence of students’ experiences and engagement with BID concepts. The preliminarily findings illustrate that student groups enjoyed BID activities presented in the curriculum as they promoted students’ exploration of biological systems. BID integration allowed students to view nature differently, which some students indicated they had not previously employed for their design solutions. Although some students mentioned BID activities that helped them during the brainstorming phase of the design process, they were unable to explain BID integration in their final design solutions, unless prompted by the teacher. Furthermore, across the student groups, students indicated that prototype and test was the most engaging stage of the EDP since during this stage they were able to test their designs. This research is novel in its focus on understanding high school students’ experiences with the integration of BID in engineering and has important implications for diversifying engineering in K-12 education. 

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5. Eco-Solutioning: The Design and Evaluation of a Curricular Unit to Foster Students’ Creation of Solutions to Address Local Socio-Scientific Issues

   https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.642320  

   Songer, Nancy Butler; Ibarrola_Recalde, Guillermo D (March 2021, Frontiers in Education)

   The global pandemic and climate change have led to unprecedented environmental, social, and economic challenges with interdisciplinary STEM foundations. Even as STEM learning has never been more important, very few pre-college programs prepare students to address these challenges by emphasizing socio-scientific issue (SSI) problem solving and the engineering design of solutions to address local phenomena. The paper discusses the design and evaluation of a pre-college, SSI curricular unit where students expand their learning by creating solutions to increase biodiversity within local urban neighborhoods. The learning approach, which we call eco-solutioning, builds from current vision and policy documents in STEM education emphasizing phenomenon-centric instructional materials, science investigations, and engineering design. The paper outlines design principles for creating an eco-solutioning instructional unit that guides young students to: collect and analyze data on local organisms, use an engineering design approach to craft solutions to increase local biodiversity, and present their solutions to local city planners and community members. Two cycles of research studies evaluated student learning using paired t-tests. Results demonstrated significant pre-post learning outcomes in both research cycles. A third research cycle in the form of a summer extension program supported students as they implemented their local solutions. Conclusions highlight design principles for the successful creation of SSI curricular units centered on local environmental issues of interest to students, teachers, and stakeholders. 

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