Search for: All records

Engineering‐oriented bridge programs and camps are popular strategies for broadening participation. The students who often serve as counselors and mentors in these programs are integral to their success.

Predicated on the belief that mentoring contributes to positive outcomes for the mentors themselves, we sought to understand how undergraduate student mentors approached and experienced their work with a 6‐day overnight, NSF‐sponsored youth engineering camp (YEC). This study was guided by the question: How did YEC camp counselors approach and experience their roles as mentors?

We conducted an exploratory qualitative study of four Black undergraduate engineering students' experiences with and approaches to near‐peer mentorship in the YEC program. Data consisted of transcripts from two post‐program interviews and one written reflection from each participant. We analyzed data through abductive coding and the funds of knowledge framework.

Through subsequent interpretation of code categories, we found YEC mentors: (1) engaged in altruistic motivations as YEC mentors, (2) leveraged previous experiences to guide their approaches to mentorship, and (3) engaged in self‐directed learning and development.

This study highlights the knowledge and strategies that YEC mentors drew upon in their roles, and how they sought and achieved various personal, academic, and professional benefits. Insights from this study illustrate how near‐peer mentors can support their and others' engineering aspirations.

 

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents findings on the impact of framing Engineering as a prosocial career on high school students’ engineering identity formation. Engineers are often stereotyped as people who work alone and are primarily motivated by financial rewards. This stereotype may deter students who value altruism from pursuing engineering career pathways. In reality, many engineers work in collaborative, creative, interdisciplinary fields on problems that positively affect society. This work examined the impacts of framing engineering as altruistic on the engineering identity development of low socioeconomic status, predominantly Black high school students in an urban region of the Southern United States. The program consisted of a summer camp and academic year activities that included mentoring from underrepresented minority undergraduate engineering students. The program content was aligned to the US National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges for Engineering (GCEs), a list of 14 critical challenges that society faces that will require engineering solutions to address. Each of these challenges highlights the exciting ways that a career in engineering allows students to serve their communities and improve the lives of others. A convergent, mixed-methods approach was used to understand how this program affected students’ perceptions of and interest in engineering. These results were compared to those for a traditional STEM Saturday informal education program with participants from the same demographic group. The altruistic framing resulted in students’ having a broader definition of engineering as well as increased interest in engineering as a potential career. 

Highlighting the role engineers have in solving community and global challenges has been shown to positively affect students' engineering identity development. Poor water quality and water scarcity have been recognized as a critical global issue by many organizations, including the United Nations. Students of all ages can relate to the importance of having drinkable water through their experiences with thirst, drought, floods, news stories, or just accidentally swallowing salt water while on holiday at a beach. This talk describes the development and implementation of a series of engineering education activities focused on water quality. These activities ranged from three-minute activities for community outreach events to week-long lessons for engineering freshmen. Younger students were able to readily recognize how using different types of filters and natural media can increase the clarity of water with particulate or color contamination. Middle and high school students were able to design and test filter set-ups and learn about the role of nanotechnology in water purification. They also developed analytical and data analysis skills through qualitative and quantitative water quality measurements. Freshman engineering students learned about the water industry, local and global water issues, and performed water quality sampling around their campuses using portable meters that log data via a cell phone app. The activities and results were then used to meet university-course outcomes related to the societal impacts of engineering, statistical analysis, plotting data, and written communication. By centering learning on a tangible and important engineering challenge, this work provides a flexible framework for learning and problem solving that can be tailored to the needs of students from different age groups and for different learning outcomes. 

This poster presents the use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) to tackle 4 amongst the “14 Grand Challenges for Engineering in the 21st Century” identified by National Academy of Engineering. AR and VR are the technologies of the present and the future. AR creates a composite view by adding digital content to a real world view, often by using the camera of a smartphone and VR creates an immersive view where the user’s view is often cut off from the real world. The 14 challenges identify areas of science and technology that are achievable and sustainable to assist people and the planet to prosper. The 4 challenges tackled using AR/VR application in this poster are: Enhance virtual reality, Advance personalized learning, Provide access to clean water, and Make solar energy affordable. The solar system VR application is aimed at tackling two of the engineering challenges: (1) Enhance virtual reality and (2) Advance personalized learning. The VR application assists the user in visualizing and understanding our solar system by using a VR headset. It includes an immersive 360 degree view of our solar system where the user can use controllers to interact with celestial bodies-related information and to teleport to different points in the space to have a closer look at the planets and the Sun. The user has six degrees of freedom. The AR application for water tackles the engineering challenge: “Provide access to clean water”. The AR water application shows information on drinking water accessibility and the eco-friendly usage of bottles over plastic cups within the department buildings inside Auburn University. The user of the application has an augmented view of drinking water information on a smartphone. Every time the user points the smartphone camera towards a building, the application will render a composite view with drinking water information associated to the building. The Sun path visualization AR application tackles the engineering challenge: “Make solar energy affordable”. The application helps the user visualize sun path at a selected time and location. The sun path is augmented in the camera view of the device when the user points the camera towards the sky. The application provides information on sun altitude and azimuth. Also, it provides the user with sunrise and sunset data for a selected day. The information provided by the application can aid the user with effective solar panel placement. Using AR and VR technology to tackle these challenges enhances the user experience. The information from these applications are better curated and easily visualized, thus readily understandable by the end user. Therefore, usage of AR and VR technology to tackle these type of engineering challenges looks promising. 

Researchers theorize that identification with a career field is achieved when there is alignment between student values and their perceptions of the values a career field meets. Stereotypically, engineering is perceived to align with status values, such as high pay, but the reality is that engineering is a collaborative enterprise that solves important social challenges. The goal of this study was to understand how highlighting this broader review of engineering (i.e., altruistic framing) affected students’ interest in the field. We evaluated a traditional Saturday STEM program for Southern, urban African American youth that did not include a significant altruism component. In parallel, we designed a program for this same demographic group that used Grand Challenges for Engineering to create altruistic framing that highlights the impacts of engineering on society and our everyday lives. Students from the same region as the traditional STEM program were recruited for this new summer camp program called Tomorrow’s Community Innovators. We compared the impacts of the traditional STEM program to the camp with altruistic framing to explore how they impacted students’ attitudes towards engineering and perceptions of the field. 

The National Academy of Engineering’s “Fourteen Grand Challenges for Engineering in the Twenty-First Century” identifies challenges in science and technology that are both feasible and sustainable to help people and the planet prosper. Four of these challenges are: advance personalized learning, enhance virtual reality, make solar energy affordable and provide access to clean water. In this work, the authors discuss developing of applications using immersive technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and their significance in addressing four of the challenges. The Drinking Water AR mobile application helps users easily locate drinking water sources inside Auburn University (AU) campus, thus providing easy access to clean water. The Sun Path mobile application helps users visualize Sun’s path at any given time and location. Students study Sun path in various fields but often have a hard time visualizing and conceptualizing it, therefore the application can help. Similarly, the application could possibly assist the users in efficient solar panel placement. Architects often study Sun path to evaluate solar panel placement at a particular location. An effective solar panel placement helps optimize degree of efficiency of using the solar energy. The Solar System Oculus Quest VR application enables users in viewing all eight planets and the Sun in the solar system. Planets are simulated to mimic their position, scale, and rotation relative to the Sun. Using the Oculus Quest controllers, disguised as human hands in the scene, users can teleport within the world view, and can get closer to each planet and the Sun to have a better view of the objects and the text associated with the objects. As a result, tailored learning is aided, and Virtual Reality is enhanced. In a camp held virtually, due to Covid-19, K12 students were introduced to the concept and usability of the applications. Likert scales metric was used to assess the efficacy of application usage. The data shows that participants of this camp benefited from an immersive learning experience that allowed for simulation with inclusion of VR and AR. 

This article describes how broadening students' views of engineering may contribute to increased diversity. It describes how showing that engineering is altruistic may increase interest among underrepresented groups and describes activities that highlight the societal impacts of engineering. 

This work in progress paper describes results from a NSF Research in the Formation of Engineers grant. The overarching objective of this research is to understand how framing engineering as an altruistic profession affects the engineering identity development of low socioeconomic status (SES) African American 8th - 10th grade students from an urban area within a predominantly rural Southern state. While there has been significant focus on increasing STEM knowledge and career interests for underrepresented minority (predominantly African American) low SES students from rural regions of these states, less focus has been paid to engineering specifically and to urban areas in this region. Little is known about how the intersections of race, poverty, local environment, and regional culture affect this group’s perceptions of potential engineering career pathways. This research seeks to understand the effects of different interventions on students’ self-efficacy and interest in engineering. In the first part, the effects of an existing Saturday STEM program were investigated. In the second part, the effects of a camp and mentoring program which highlights the positive societal impacts of engineering are being investigated. This paper highlights the structure of these programs and findings to date