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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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Board 421: Using Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Challenges Coupled with Career Exploration to Develop an Engineering Identity in Low-Income Students
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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- Award ID(s):
- 1930497
- PAR ID:
- 10563034
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Conferences
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Portland, Oregon
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47011
