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The Engineering in Context learning community at Whatcom Community College seeks to welcome and onboard new engineering students with an integrated two-quarter cohort learning experience. This collaboration between engineering, mathematics, history, English, and physics faculty consists of a six-course curriculum that integrates contextualized precalculus, English composition, Pacific Northwest history, engineering orientation, and introductory problem-solving and computing skills. The program employs high-impact practices including place-based learning, community-engaged projects, and undergraduate research to motivate foundational skill development, emphasize social relevance, and develop students' engineering identity, sense of belonging, and academic readiness. The Historical Marker Project is a cornerstone of the learning community’s first-quarter curriculum drawing on a multidisciplinary approach to reveal the layers of the built environment, from a natural to an engineered shoreline. This quarter-long project seeks to engage students with one of the essential questions of the overarching learning community experience: “How does the engineered world affect how we live?” The project begins in Week 2 with a field trip to the city’s waterfront, which is currently undergoing cleanup and re-envisioning of 137 acres of Bellingham’s downtown core as part of a long-term process of deindustrialization coinciding with the closure of the Georgia Pacific’s pulp, chemical, and tissue operations in 2007. The project culminates in Week 10 with a multi-media presentation evaluating aspects of the cumulative impacts of 150 years of development and alteration of an engineered shoreline. For the history portion, students do original research at the regional archives to identify changes to the landscape over time and evaluate historical sources to determine the causes of these alterations. In the process, students develop history course outcomes, including (1) analyzing primary and secondary sources to evaluate historical arguments for credibility, position, perspective, and relevance; (2) locating sources in their historical context; and (3) identifying the ways political economy have shaped land and resource use in the region. The blending of disciplines occurs in the latter half of the term when students write the story of a site using the methods of a historian while simultaneously using newfound math and engineering skills to analyze the system and create a visual representation. We share student feedback, reflections, and final assessment results demonstrating how skill acquisition in history, engineering, and mathematics can be woven together to foster connections between people and place while making the socially relevant connections crucial for students’ sense of belonging. 

Significant numbers of first-year community college students place below Calculus-level mathematics and are underprepared for direct entrance to core prerequisite courses in an engineering baccalaureate degree curriculum. As a result, a potentially daunting and abstract sequence of math courses can dissuade otherwise promising candidates from the engineering profession. This NSF-IUSE project, launched in fall 2022, is a collaboration between engineering, mathematics, history, English, and physics faculty to create a two-quarter learning community experience for precalculus-level students entering our engineering transfer program at Whatcom Community College. The Engineering in Context Learning Community is a six-course curriculum that integrates contextualized precalculus, English composition, Pacific Northwest history, engineering orientation, and introductory problem solving and computing skills. The program employs high-impact practices including place-based learning, community-engaged projects, contextualized instruction, and undergraduate research to motivate foundational skill development, emphasize social relevance, and develop students' engineering identity, sense of belonging, and academic readiness. The 2023-24 academic year marked the first pilot offering of the new learning community with an initial cohort of 19 students out of a capacity limit of 24. This poster will report on early findings comparing persistence rates into the second-year curriculum between the first learning community cohort and our more general engineering student population. For example, 12 out of 19 (68%) cohort students enrolled in Calculus 1 within two terms of starting Precalculus 1. This retention rate compares to 13 out of 30 (43%) for non-cohort students who were concurrently enrolled in Precalculus 1 and Introduction to Engineering. We will also present survey results for socioemotional constructs such as motivation, engineering identity, and sense of belonging with preliminary analysis of how the responses of cohort students compare to the rest of our engineering student population. 

Students from historically marginalized backgrounds – especially low-income students, students of color, and/or first generation in college – disproportionately place below Calculus level math and are often underprepared for direct entrance to an engineering baccalaureate degree curriculum. The Engineering in Context learning community at Whatcom Community College seeks to take a holistic approach to address this challenge by welcoming students into a multidisciplinary cohort experience. This course sequence spans two academic quarters and includes six different courses including a two-quarter contextualized precalculus for engineering sequence, contextualized English composition, Pacific Northwest history, and an existing two-quarter introduction to engineering sequence. While this approach leverages multiple high-impact educational practices, this work-in-progress paper will focus on the contextualized precalculus component, and specifically the use of hands-on math labs taught using engineering facilities and equipment. The two Precalculus for Engineering courses are taught by mathematics faculty and feature a series of inquiry-based lab activities designed by the math, engineering, and physics faculty to motivate student effort and to provide additional practice with relevant math skills and concepts. These labs use physics and/or engineering applications to introduce key math concepts and develop student buy-in before scaffolding to more abstract math problems representative of what students will encounter in future math courses. For example, students review right triangle trigonometry and revisit more complex triangle problems in the context of analyzing the kinematics of a robotic arm. In another lab, students explore the concept of composing functions by exploring axial deformation under tension in bars of variable cross-sectional area. The paper discusses these examples and others along with the overall sequence of labs, how they intersect with the concurrent engineering courses or preview future engineering/physics courses, and how they fit together as a whole to support both the precalculus course learning outcomes and the larger goals of the learning community experience. We also share initial student feedback on the lab activities. 

This NSF-IUSE project began in fall 2022 and features cross-disciplinary collaboration between faculty in engineering, math, history, English, and physics to design, pilot, and assess a new learning community approach to welcome precalculus level students into an engineering transfer degree program. The learning community spans two academic quarters and includes six different courses. The place-based curriculum includes contextualized precalculus and English composition, Pacific Northwest history, orientation to the engineering profession, and introductory skills such as problem-solving, computer programming, and team-based design. The program also features community-engaged project-based learning in the first quarter and a course-based undergraduate research experience in the second quarter, both with an overarching theme of energy and water resources. The approach leverages multiple high-impact educational practices to promote deep conceptual learning, motivate foundational skill development, explore social relevance and connection, and ultimately seeks to strengthen our students’ engineering identity, sense of belonging, and general academic preparation for success in an engineering major. Fall 2023 marked the first quarter of piloting the new learning community with a cohort of 19 students out of a capacity limit of 24. This paper reports on the demographics of the first cohort and compares them to enrollment in a parallel section of our Introduction to Engineering course that is not linked. We also share some of the students’ reasons for enrolling and their feedback on the experience. We found that students in populations with intensive entry advising such as International Programs and Running Start (a high school dual-enrollment program) appear to be overrepresented in the first cohort. This finding correlates with a theme in nearly all student responses that they learned about the program through advising. Finally, we describe some example activities and student projects that illustrate how the curriculum design integrates content across the academic disciplines involved. 

The Association of American Colleges and Universities identifies undergraduate research experiences as a high impact practice for increasing student success and retention in STEM majors. Most undergraduate research opportunities for community college engineering students involve partnerships with universities and typically take the form of paid summer experiences. Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) offer an alternative model with potential for significant expansion of research opportunities for students. This approach weaves research into the courses students are already required to complete for their degrees. CUREs are an equitable approach for introducing students to research because they do not demand extracurricular financial and/or time commitments beyond what students must already commit to for their courses. This paper describes an adaptable model for implementing a CURE in an introductory engineering design and computing course that features applications of low-cost microcontrollers. Students work toward course learning outcomes focused on computer programming, engineering design processes, and effective teamwork in the context of multi-term research and development efforts to design, build, and test devices for other CUREs in science lab courses as well as for other applications at the college or with community partners. Students choose from a menu of projects each term, with a typical course offering involving four to six different projects running simultaneously. Each team identifies a focused design and development scope of work within the larger context of the project they are interested in. They give weekly progress reports and gather input from their customers. The work culminates in a prototype and final report to document their work for student teams who will carry it forward in future terms. We assessed the impact of the experience on students’ beliefs about science and engineering, STEM confidence, and career aspirations using a nationally normed survey for CUREs in STEM and report results from five terms of offering this course. We find statistically significant pre-post gains on two-thirds of the survey items relating to students’ understanding of the research process and confidence in their STEM abilities. The pre-post gains are generally comparable to those reported by others who used the same survey to assess the impact of a summer research experience for community college students. These findings indicate that the benefits of student participation in this CURE model are comparable to the benefits students see by participation in summer research programs.