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1. Work in Progress: Formation of an engineering identity in first-year students through an intervention centered on senior design projects

   Richards, Abigail M; Anderson, Ryan; Myers, Carrie B (July 2020, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   Abstract This “work in progress” paper describes a multiyear project to study the development of engineering identity in a chemical and biological engineering program at Montana State University. The project focuses on how engineering identity may be impacted by a series of interventions utilizing subject material in a senior-level capstone design course and has the senior capstone design students serve as peer-mentors to first- and second-year students. A more rapid development of an engineering identity by first- and second-year students is suspected to increase retention and persistence in this engineering program. Through a series of timed interventions scheduled to take place in the first and second year, which includes cohorts that will serve as negative controls (no intervention), we hope to ascertain the following: (1) the extent to which, relative to a control group, exposure to a peer mentor increases a students’ engineering identity development over time compared to those who do not receive peer mentoring and (2) if the quantity and/or timing of the peer interactions impact engineering identity development. While the project includes interventions for both first- and second-year students, this work in progress paper focuses on the experiences of first year freshman as a result of the interventions and their development of an engineering identity over the course of the semester. Early in the fall semester, freshman chemical engineering students enrolled in an introductory chemical engineering course and senior students in a capstone design course were administered a survey which contained a validated instrument to assess engineering identity. The first-year course has 107 students and the senior-level course has 92 students and approximately 50% of the students in both cohorts completed the survey. Mid-semester, after the first-year students were introduced to the concepts of process flow diagrams and material balances in their course, senior design student teams gave presentations about their capstone design projects in the introductory course. The presentations focused on the project goals, design process and highlighted the process flow diagrams. After the presentations, freshman and senior students attended small group dinners as part of a homework assignment wherein the senior students were directed to communicate information about their design projects as well as share their experiences in the chemical engineering program. Dinners occurred overall several days, with up to ten freshman and five seniors attending each event. Freshman students were encouraged to use this time to discover more about the major, inquire about future course work, and learn about ways to enrich their educational experience through extracurricular and co-curricular activities. Several weeks after the dinner experience, senior students returned to give additional presentations to the freshman students to focus on the environmental and societal impacts of their design projects. We report baseline engineering identity in this paper. 

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2. A Pilot Program in Open-Ended Problem Solving and Project Management

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--27494  

   Yanik, Paul; Ferguson, Chip; Kaul, Sudhir; Yan, Yanjun (June 2017, American Society for Engineering Education)

   This research is motivated by the need for students’ early exposure to work readiness skills that promote effectiveness in dealing with complex open-ended technical problems as may be encountered in senior capstone projects or professional practice. This paper presents preliminary work in the use of building Rube Goldberg machines as student projects to foster some of these skills. Design of Rube Goldberg machines may be employed in a number of settings as a vehicle for teaching basic engineering skills. These designs require students to creatively consider a variety of unconventional approaches to solve simple problems. The Rube Goldberg paradigm allows students to communicate and to advance their ideas in a low-pressure environment where brainstorming is highly valued and where prior technical expertise affords no specific advantage. As such, projects based on Rube Goldberg machines are an effective way for freshmen and sophomore students, who may lack extensive technical skills, to acquire greater proficiency in some of the non-technical skills. This research gives results from a pilot study in project management using the Rube Goldberg model. The goal of this study is to determine the perceived efficacy of a proposed teaching vehicle for project management concepts that could strengthen the early stages of an existing series of Project Based Learning (PBL) oriented undergraduate engineering courses at the host institution, which currently make use of more closed-ended and single-solution design projects. In the study, a cohort of 27 engineering and engineering technology students participated in a sequence of extracurricular sessions in which they undertook progressively challenging open-ended project assignments. Each project introduced new constraints that required the students to address additional aspects of project management. Results from an end-of-year survey show that the participants had strongly positive impressions of their experiences related to these exercises. A majority of students felt that they had enhanced skills that would be valuable in professional life (96%), improved their leadership skills (92%), and had gained appreciation for the value of project planning (100%) and technical documentation (96%). It is anticipated that lessons learned from the project sequence will provide the framework for cross-disciplinary freshman and sophomore assignments in host institution’s PBL curriculum in the future. 

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3. Work in Progress: Impacting Engineering First-year Student Retention Through a Nonconventional Engineering Learning Community

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35647  

   Bartolomei-Suarez, Sonia; Jimenez, Manuel; Guillemard, Luisa; Suarez, Oscar; Santiago-Román, Aidsa; Santiago, Nayda; Lopez del Puerto, Carla; Quintero, Pedro; Cardona-Martínez, Nelson; Valentin, Anidza (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   This work in progress explores the impact of activities developed to improve students’ persistence in engineering undergraduate programs as part of a five-year NSF grant. The Program for Engineering Access, Retention, and LIATS Success (PEARLS), has been running for one year in the College of Engineering (CoE) in our institution attempting to increase persistence, retention and graduation rates, and professional success of low-income, academically talented students (LIATS). This paper describes the design of a novel engineering learning community (ELC) introduced as part of the PEARLS project interventions. The ELC is fostered through activities included in a course designed for PEARLS first-year students. During the course, first-year and senior students engaged in different ways: through senior design and capstone projects, peer demonstrations of team projects, and lab visits. We discuss the course structure, activities, and early findings of its implementation. 

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4. Work in Progress: Qualitative Differences in Learning Processes and Skill Development Across Engineering Capstone Teams

   Clay, C; Daschil, J.; Alemán, M.; Linsey, J.; Nagel, R (July 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   This work in progress paper presents a study that follows four engineering capstone teams over the course of their two-year projects. Students on four different teams collected ethnographic and autoethnographic data in the form of field notes to explore how students learn across a variety of projects that vary in their scope, type, and team composition. This paper aims to explain the impacts that role rigidity and project management style have on the design process and discuss the factors that influence the types of learning occurring in capstone teams. Data suggest that project scope, role rigidity, and the level of ambiguity in the project impact the learning processes employed by different teams, and the skills that team members developed. 

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5. Experiences during the implementation of two different project-based learning assignments in a fluid mechanics course.

   Ayala, O. (August 2022, Zone 1 Conference of the American Society for Engineering Education)

   There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of project-based learning (PBL) in preparing students to solve complex problems. In PBL implementations in engineering, students are treated as professional engineers facing projects centered around real-world problems, including the complexity and uncertainty that influence such problems. Not only does this help students to analyze and solve an authentic real-world task, promoting critical thinking, but also students learn from each other, learning valuable communication and teamwork skills. Faculty play an important part by assuming non-conventional roles (e.g., client, senior professional engineer, consultant) to help students throughout this instructional and learning approach. Typically in PBLs, students work on projects over extended periods of time that culminate in realistic products or presentations. In order to be successful, students need to learn how to frame a problem, identify stakeholders and their requirements, design and select concepts, test them, and so on. Two different implementations of PBL projects in a fluid mechanics course are presented in this paper. This required, junior-level course has been taught since 2014 by the same instructor. The first PBL project presented is a complete design of pumped pipeline systems for a hypothetical plant. In the second project, engineering students partnered with pre-service teachers to design and teach an elementary school lesson on fluid mechanics concepts. With the PBL implementations, it is expected that students: 1) engage in a deeper learning process where concepts can be reemphasized, and students can realize applicability; 2) develop and practice teamwork skills; 3) learn and practice how to communicate effectively to peers and to those from other fields; and 4) increase their confidence working on open-ended situations and problems. The goal of this paper is to present the experiences of the authors with both PBL implementations. It explains how the projects were scaffolded through the entire semester, including how the sequence of course content was modified, how team dynamics were monitored, the faculty roles, and the end products and presentations. Students' experiences are also presented. To evaluate and compare students’ learning and satisfaction with the team experience between the two PBL implementations, a shortened version of the NCEES FE exam and the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness (CATME) survey were utilized. Students completed the FE exam during the first week and then again during the last week of the semester in order to assess students’ growth in fluid mechanics knowledge. The CATME survey was completed mid-semester to help faculty identify and address problems within team dynamics, and at the end of the semester to evaluate individual students’ teamwork performance. The results showed that no major differences were observed in terms of the learned fluid mechanics content, however, the data showed interesting preliminary observations regarding teamwork satisfaction. Through reflective assignments (e.g., short answer reflections, focus groups), student perceptions of the PBL implementations are discussed in the paper. Finally, some of the challenges and lessons learned from implementing both projects multiple times, as well as access to some of the PBL course materials and assignments will be provided. 

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