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Engineers are uniquely positioned to create solutions that do not yet exist. The National Academy of Engineering’s Changing the Conversation report includes specific messaging that engineers design the future. One can invent and integrate technology in new ways to make a future happen. Mechanical engineering students are well placed to become fluent with technology as well as achieving a better understanding of how one might apply that to create something novel and of value. Whether it be more efficient means for transportation that are less impactful on the environment, or a new widget that makes interactions more meaningful, there is a physical scale and scope of impact that mechanical engineers can impart directly with stakeholders and users. Because items imagined can be within the size of consumer products where solutions may be simply created and mocked up, there is a unique opportunity to better understand these students’ behaviors in designing and prototyping. This research project explores how a cohort of senior mechanical engineering students can design and prototype solutions for a problem today, and how their solutions are changed when asked to be placed out into the future. We are curious about the similarities and differences in their approaches along aspects of the design process (cognition) and in the design result (artifacts). This project allows us to explore how engineering students conceive of the breadth of impact of engineering on the future 5-10-20 years out through reviewing their work and classifying their work product. 

This NSF EEC EAGER research project investigates how undergraduate STEM and engineering students’ learning trajectories evolve over time, from 1st year to senior year, along a novice to expert spectrum. We borrow the idea of “learning trajectories” from mathematics education that can paint the evolution of students’ knowledge and skills over time over a set of learning experiences. We use a theoretical framework based on adaptive expertise and design thinking adaptive expertise to further advance a design learning continuum. 

Traditionally, engineering design is taught as a tool for synthesis and integration of engineering content knowledge for students in capstone courses. These engineering design courses are usually successful, in that the students do well, they come up with innovative solutions, and they are satisfied with their school experience and feel ready for the real world. But, what is the evidence that students have actually learned and can apply their design and engineering learning successfully for synthesis and integration? What are the student’s own understandings of the design process and engineering design practice? How might they conceive of their own engineering and design epistemic identities? This work investigates these questions. 

This NSF EAGER research paper investigates how undergraduate STEM and engineering students’ learning trajectories evolve over time, from 1st to senior year, along a novice to expert spectrum. We borrow the idea of “learning trajectories” from mathematics education that can paint the evolution of students’ knowledge and skills over time over a set of learning experiences. Curricula for undergraduate engineering programs can reflect an intended pathway of knowledge construction within a discipline. We intend our study of individual students within undergraduate STEM and engineering programs can highlight how this may happen in situ and how it may be similar or might differ from a given, prescribed programs of study among disciplines. We use a theoretical framework based in adaptive expertise and design thinking adaptive expertise to develop a design learning continuum further. Envisioned routes through disciplinary undergraduate curricula and student conceptions of their design process are explored through qualitative, semi-structured interviews with undergraduate 1st year and senior year students across STEM, engineering and non-STEM field such as computer science, mechanical engineering, general engineering, mathematics, science, English, and art. We also conduct similar interviews with faculty in these fields who are responsible and knowledgeable for undergraduate programs about their perceived benefits for the structure of their program’s curriculum. Additional information is collected from noticing the organizational and pedagogical structures of the relative undergraduate curriculum. Initial findings/outcomes suggest that traditions to knowledge construction both differ across disciplinary approaches and have similarities across non-obvious disciplinary relationships. Faculty have a firm understanding of how one class chains from one to another; students have less of a field of view for how mindful chunks of knowledge combine together.