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1. 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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2. Can We Make Our Robot Play Soccer? Influence of Collaborating with Preservice Teachers and Fifth Graders on Undergraduate Engineering Students’ Learning during a Robotic Design Process (Work in Progress)

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--41343  

   Kaipa, Krishnanand; Kidd, Jennifer; Noginova, Julia; Cima, Francisco; Ringleb, Stacie; Ayala, Orlando; Pazos, Pilar; Gutierrez, Kristie; Lee, Min Jung (August 2022, ASEE Conferences)

   This work-in-progress paper describes engineering students’ experiences in an NSF-funded project that partnered undergraduate engineering students with pre-service teachers to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. This project aims to address an apparent gap between what is taught in academia and industry’s expectations of engineers to integrate perspectives from outside their field to solve modern societal problems requiring a multidisciplinary approach. Working in small teams over Zoom, participating engineering, education, and fifth grade students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired COVID companion robots. The goal for the engineering students was to build new interprofessional skills, while reinforcing technical skills. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird BitTM hardware (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process (EDP), and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots. Additionally, each undergraduate engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their preservice teacher and fifth grade partners. The intervention took place in Spring 2021 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, necessitating the investigators to make critical decisions to address challenges of implementing the intervention in an online setting. This paper describes those decisions as it investigates how the cross-disciplinary, mixed-aged collaboration with preservice teachers and fifth graders impacted undergraduate engineering students’ learning and investment during the design process of their robots. Preliminary results of a regression analysis revealed a relationship between the engineering students’ robot rankings and post-scores on the design process knowledge survey (r = 0.92). Consistencies and a few anomalies in this pattern were explained using qualitative reflections which were analyzed to determine students’ level of investment in the project, overall perceptions, and the extent to which they focused on the fifth graders’ ideas in their designs. In general, robot quality was linked to both undergraduate engineering students’ level of investment and whether they focused on the fifth graders’ ideas in their designs. Engineering students’ overall perceptions of the project were generally positive, appreciating the role of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations in their learning to brainstorm innovative solutions and interact effectively with professionals outside of engineering as they embark on tackling societal problems in the real world. 

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3. What do Undergraduate Engineering Students and Pre-service Teachers Learn by Collaborating and Teaching Engineering and Coding Through Robotics?

   Kidd, J.; Kaipa, K.; Sacks, S.; Ringleb, S.; Pazos, P.; Gutierrez, K.; Ayala, O. M.; de Souza Almeida, L. M. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Online)

   This research paper presents preliminary results of an NSF-supported interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate engineering students and preservice teachers. The fields of engineering and elementary education share similar challenges when it comes to preparing undergraduate students for the new demands they will encounter in their profession. Engineering students need interprofessional skills that will help them value and negotiate the contributions of various disciplines while working on problems that require a multidisciplinary approach. Increasingly, the solutions to today's complex problems must integrate knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines and engineers must be able to recognize when expertise from outside their field can enhance their perspective and ability to develop innovative solutions. However, research suggests that it is challenging even for professional engineers to understand the roles, responsibilities, and integration of various disciplines, and engineering curricula have traditionally left little room for development of non-technical skills such as effective communication with a range of audiences and an ability to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. Meanwhile, preservice teachers need new technical knowledge and skills that go beyond traditional core content knowledge, as they are now expected to embed engineering into science and coding concepts into traditional subject areas. There are nationwide calls to integrate engineering and coding into PreK-6 education as part of a larger campaign to attract more students to STEM disciplines and to increase exposure for girls and minority students who remain significantly underrepresented in engineering and computer science. Accordingly, schools need teachers who have not only the knowledge and skills to integrate these topics into mainstream subjects, but also the intention to do so. However, research suggests that preservice teachers do not feel academically prepared and confident enough to teach engineering-related topics. This interdisciplinary project provided engineering students with an opportunity to develop interprofessional skills as well as to reinforce their technical knowledge, while preservice teachers had the opportunity to be exposed to engineering content, more specifically coding, and develop competence for their future teaching careers. Undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a computational methods course and preservice teachers enrolled in an educational technology course partnered to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth and sixth graders. This paper reports on the effects of this collaboration on twenty engineering students and eight preservice teachers. T-tests were used to compare participants’ pre-/post- scores on a coding quiz. A post-lesson written reflection asked the undergraduate students to describe their robotics lessons and what they learned from interacting with their cross disciplinary peers and the fifth/sixth graders. Content analysis was used to identify emergent themes. Engineering students’ perceptions were generally positive, recounting enjoyment interacting with elementary students and gaining communication skills from collaborating with non-technical partners. Preservice teachers demonstrated gains in their technical knowledge as measured by the coding quiz, but reported lacking the confidence to teach coding and robotics independently of their partner engineering students. Both groups reported gaining new perspectives from working in interdisciplinary teams and seeing benefits for the fifth and sixth grade participants, including exposing girls and students of color to engineering and computing. 

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4. The Influence of Participation in a Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Service Learning Project on the Effectiveness of Team Members in a 100-level Mechanical Engineering Class

   Ringleb, SI; Pazos, P; Noginova, J; Cima, F; Ayala, OM; Kaipa, K; Kidd, JJ; Gutierrez, K (January 2021, 2021 ASEE Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   Engineers need to develop professional skills, including the ability to work successfully in teams and to communicate within and outside of their discipline, in addition to required technical skills. A collaborative multi-disciplinary service learning project referred to as Ed+gineering was implemented in a 100-level mechanical engineering course. In this collaboration, mechanical engineering students, primarily in the second semester of their freshman year or first semester of their second year, worked over the course of a semester with education students taking a foundations course to develop and deliver engineering lessons to fourth or fifth graders. Students in comparison engineering classes worked on a team project focused on experimental design for a small satellite system. The purpose of this study was to determine if participating in the Ed+gineering collaboration had a positive effect on teamwork effectiveness and satisfaction when compared to the comparison class. In both team projects, the five dimensions of the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) system were used as a quantitative assessment. The five dimensions of CATME Behaviorally Anchored Ratings Scale (BARS) (contribution to the team’s work, interacting with teammates, keeping the team on track, expecting quality, and having relevant Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities - KSAs) were measured. Additionally, within the CATME platform team satisfaction, team interdependence and team cohesiveness were measured. ANCOVA analysis was used to assess the quantitative data from CATME. Preliminary results suggest that students in the treatment classes had higher team member effectiveness and overall satisfaction scores than students in the comparison classes. Qualitative data from reflections written at the completion of the aforementioned projects were used to explore these results. 

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5. The Impact of a Multidisciplinary Service-Learning Project on Engineering Knowledge and Professional Skills in Engineering and Education Students.

   Ringleb, S. I. (June 2023, ASEE New England annual conference)

   A multidisciplinary service-learning project that involved teaching engineering to fourth and fifth graders was implemented in three sets of engineering and education classes to determine if there was an impact on engineering knowledge and teamwork skills in both the engineering and education students as well as persistence in the engineering students. Collaboration 1 paired a 100-level engineering Information Literacy class in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a 300-level Educational Foundation class. Collaboration 2 combined a 300-level Electromechanical Systems class in Mechanical Engineering with a 400-level Educational Technology class. Collaboration 3 paired a 300-level Fluid Mechanics class in Mechanical Engineering Technology with a 400-level Elementary Science Methods class. Collaborations 1 and 3 interacted with fourth or fifth graders by developing and delivering lessons to the elementary students. Students in collaboration 2 worked with fifth graders in an after-school technology club. While each collaboration had its unique elements, all collaborations included the engineering design process both in classroom instruction and during the service learning project. Quantitative data were collected from both engineering and education students in a pretest/posttest design. Teamwork skills were measured in engineering students using a validated teamwork skills assessment based on peer evaluation. Each class had a comparison class taught by the same instructor that included a team project, and the same quantitative measures. Engineering students who participated in collaboration 1 were evaluated for retention, which was defined as students who were still enrolled in the college of engineering and technology two semesters after completion of the course. Engineering students also completed an evaluation of academic and professional persistence. For the engineering students, none of the assessments involving technical skills had significant differences, although the design process knowledge tests trended upward in the treatment classes. The preservice teachers in the treatment group scored significantly higher in the design process knowledge test, and preservice teachers in collaborations 1 and 3 had higher scores in the engineering knowledge test than the comparison group. Teamwork skills in the treatment group were significantly higher than in the comparison group for both engineering and education students. Thus, engineering and education students in the treatment groups saw gains in teamwork skills, while education students saw more gains in engineering knowledge. Finally, all engineering students had significantly higher professional persistence. 

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