14th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience (FYEE) Conference
University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee
July 30, 2023
July 30, 2023
August 1, 2023
5
10.18260/1-2--44857
https://peer.asee.org/44857
152
Darren Maczka is a Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor in the Engineering Fundamentals program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his PhD in Engineering Education from Virginia Tech. His research interests include broadening participation in Engineering, computing education, and sociotechnical aspects of teaching and learning.
Erin is a Research Assistant Professor and Lecturer in the Engineering Fundamentals Program at the University of Tennessee. She completed a postdoctoral/ lecturer position split between the General Engineering program and the Engineering & Science Education Department and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Clemson University. Erin’s research interests include preparing students for their sophomore year, minority student engineering identity development, and providing mentoring relationships to help foster student growth and success.
There has been much interest in supporting the development of computational thinking skills in engineering students. Computational thinking (CT) supports both general problem-solving as well as computer programming. This work-in-progress paper describes efforts to develop a new two-course sequence that combines an introduction to engineering physics with computation and modeling. These courses were developed to support students who entered not calculus ready in their first semester. Retention rates for these students were significantly lower than calculus ready students, with 40% of these students never reaching their first engineering course. Evidence that integrated curricula lead to strengthened learning outcomes was a significant motivator in the development of this course sequence. We discuss how existing work informed the design of the course. The course sequence has both active-learning lecture sections as well as lab activities. Integration of CT occurs in both. We hope that a successful integration of CT will help us answer this research question: Does CT implemented in the context of a physics course improve learners’ problem-solving self-efficacy, programming self-efficacy, or both as compared to learners who experience similar content in separate courses? In conducting this work, we plan to collect pilot data from our population receiving the CT implementation that are enrolled in the two-course sequence and control students in the regular first physics course, both at the end of the fall and spring semesters. We expect to see that the students receiving the CT instruction will demonstrate that students in the new course sequence will have higher self-efficacy in both parameters.
Maczka, D. K., & McCave, E. J. (2023, July), WIP: Integrating Computation within an Engineering Physics Course Paper presented at 14th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience (FYEE) Conference, University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--44857
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