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Parents boost STEM skills by scaffolding children’s attention and discovery during play, but many need support to do so. Using Human Centered Design (HCD) methods, we created activity kits fostering parents’ (a) involvement in and (b) valuing of parent-child play to promote preschoolers’ STEM skills. Study 1 documents how HCD methods informed the design of guided activity kits. In initial home visits, we videorecorded 6 parent-child dyads playing with basic building materials. Play revealed minimal parental STEM scaffolding and talk. Collaborating with 18 families and drawing on prior research, parent interviews, videotaped play sessions, and advisory-board members’ expertise, the interdisciplinary research team designed and refined activity kit prototypes. Study 2 was a randomized field test comparing use and evaluation of final guided kits (n=50) versus basic kits (n=25) which contained identical building materials and challenges but omitted scaffolding guides. Both groups received a kit by mail every other week for 10 weeks. Relative to parents given basic kits, parents given guided kits (a) reported significantly more sustained use of the kits across the 10 weeks, (b) felt more self-efficacy in fostering their child’s STEM learning, and (c) judged that their child had achieved greater STEM-skill learning from program use. 

Effective communication is an integral part of engineering design and leads to successful design outcomes. While there have been extensive calls to equip novice designers with effective communication skills, there is only a limited body of work that has attempted to characterize the communication patterns of novice designers, particularly when engaging with external audiences. This work seeks to characterize how the project type, or the nature of design problem, shapes the communicative patterns of novice designers when communicating design outcomes to external audiences. Presentations of design solutions from 46 teams were collected at the end of a semester-long capstone design program. These presentations were then characterized as industry- and human-centered projects. Analysis was conducted using topic modeling and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count analysis to identify differences in linguistic patterns of novice designers between the two project types. Contrary to prior findings, no significant differences were found, implying that the communication patterns of novice designers are not affected by the type of project (or design problem being solved). 

Abstract Prototyping plays a pivotal role in the engineering design process. Prototypes represent physical or digital manifestations of design ideas, and as such act as effective communication tools for designers. While the benefits of prototyping are well-documented in research, the fundamental ways in which the construction of a prototype affects designers' reflection on and evaluation of their design outcomes and processes are not well understood. The relationships between prototypes, designers' communication strategies, and recollection of design processes is of particular interest in this work, as preliminary research suggests that novice designers tend to struggle to clearly articulate the decisions made during the design process. This work serves to extend prior work and build foundational knowledge by exploring the evaluation of design outcomes and decisions, and communication strategies used by novice designers during prototyping tasks. A controlled in situ study was conducted with 45 undergraduate engineering students. Results from qualitative analyses suggest that a number of rhetorical patterns emerged in students' communications, suggesting that a complicated relationship exists between prototyping and communication. 

Abstract Prototypes are critical design artifacts, and recent studies have established the ability of prototypes to facilitate communication. However, prior work suggests that novice designers often fail to perceive prototypes as effective communication tools, and struggle to rationalize design decisions made during prototyping tasks. To understand the interactions between communication and prototypes, design pitches from 40 undergraduate engineering design teams were collected and qualitatively analysed. Our findings suggest that students used prototypes to explain and persuade, aligning with prior studies of design practitioners. The results also suggest that students tend to use prototypes to justify design decisions and adverse outcomes. Future work will seek to understand novice designers’ use of prototypes as communication tools in further depth. Ultimately, this work will inform the creation of pedagogical strategies to provide students with the skills needed to effectively communicate design solutions and intent. 

High globalization in the world today results in the involvement of multi-discipline, multi-cultural teams, as well as the entrance of more economic powers in the market. Effective innovation strategies are critical if emerging markets plan to become economic players in this increasingly connected global market. The current work compares the design processes of designers from emerging and established markets to understand how design methods are applied across culture. Specifically, the design decisions of designers from Morocco, one of the four leading economic power in Africa, and the U.S. are investigated. Concept generation and selection are the focus of the current study as they are critical steps in the design process that can determine project outcomes. Previous studies have identified three factors, ownership bias, gender, and idea goodness as influential during concept selection. The effect of these three factors on designers in the United States is well established. The current study expands upon previous findings to examine the influence of these factors across two cultures — U.S. and Morocco. The results of this study, although preliminary, found that U.S. students had a higher idea fluency than Morocco students. It also found a significant difference in idea fluency between genders in the U.S. but not in Morocco. In addition, it was found that overall, participants exhibited ownership bias toward ideas with high goodness. 

The purpose of this work is to investigate the relationship between the disciplinary diversity of capstone design teams and perceptions of success and engineering design abilities. Capstone design programs are effective environments for students to collaborate with industry sponsors on authentic design problems. They provide students with the opportunity to hone their technical and professional skills, often in teams. Previous work has demonstrated that interdisciplinary teams outperform within-discipline teams on complex open-ended tasks, but struggle to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. They also report lower levels of team cohesion and satisfaction with final outcomes. The results of the mixed-methods study conducted with 58 capstone design teams for this paper indicate that team diversity may be inversely related to students’ beliefs in their abilities to construct a prototype. Preliminary qualitative analysis suggests that students tend to divide prototyping tasks based on disciplinary background and struggle to integrate design efforts for complex systems, particularly during later stage design. 

Abstract BackgroundDuring the onset of the COVID‐19 crisis, universities rapidly pivoted to online formats and were often unable to adhere to the best practices of online learning highlighted in prior literature. It is well documented that a variety of barriers impeded “normal” educational practices. Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions of first‐year engineering students enrolled in an introductory engineering design course during the rapid transition to online working environments. We view students' perceptions through the theoretical lens of workplace thriving theory, a framework that allowed us to capture aspects of education required for students to thrive in non‐optimum learning settings. Design/MethodThis research employed semi‐structured interview methods with 13 students enrolled in an introductory engineering design course that relies on project‐based team learning. We analyzed interview transcripts using thematic analysis through an abductive approach and made interpretations through workplace thriving theory. ResultsResults indicated that students' abilities to thrive are related to four intersecting themes that demonstrate how workplace thriving theory manifests in this unanticipated online setting. These themes demonstrate elements that must be optimized for students to thrive in settings such as this: relationships with others, building and sharing knowledge through interactions, perceptions of experiential learning, and individual behaviors. ConclusionOur research, viewed through workplace thriving theory, highlights the mechanisms by which students tried to succeed in suboptimal environments. While not all our participants showed evidence of thriving, the factors required for thriving point to opportunities to harness these same factors in in‐person instruction environments.