(covering objectives, required tools, and instructions), gradingrubrics, and students’ scores. Reflective insights from students highlight not only the successfulcreation of functional Morse code machines but also a profound appreciation for the practicalapplications of Computational Thinking and programming in the realm of Electrical Engineering.Classroom Activities Leading to ProjectIn the second part of the class, students were introduced to Python and various developmentenvironments, including Spyder from Anaconda 3, as well as the Python editor and simulator forthe BBC Micro:Bit. Following the completion of each class module or topic, students wereassigned brief programming exercises. These exercises required the use of Spyder to
scalable way across the entire class. Thisprocess provided the opportunity for individual student perspectives, wishes, and experiences tobe considered and incorporated into the group formation activity. Student reflections on the useof generative AI for group formation, including when compared to an opportunity forself-selection of teammates, were mixed with the majority recommending a mixed-methodsapproach of the use of AI but with a “human in the loop” component.IntroductionThis work is inspired by, and builds upon, the many existing techniques and tools currentlysupporting engineering instructors with incorporating teamwork into their classrooms. Thisranges from the forming of teams, overseeing of team dynamics, supporting
articulation of the problem or query before promptingthe LLM. Exploratory skills are essential to navigate and become proficient with majorLLM tools like ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Google Bard. Hands-on experimentation allowsfor direct interaction, fostering a deeper understanding of LLM capabilities. Willingnessto reflect is paramount, as it encourages critical evaluation of AI-generated content andpersonal beliefs. An illustrative diagram emphasizes the interplay between promptingLLMs and receiving responses, underscoring the iterative nature of refining promptsfor optimal outcomes.Ethical Considerations and Academic Integrity. The integration of LLMs in educationbrings forth ethical considerations, particularly in maintaining academic integrity.Concerns
in general – whichsome students described as illustrative of the potential worth and impact of a single engineer.The breadth of approaches, observations, and principles relating to beauty and eleganceillustrated by this limited sample is desirable, as the point of the class is not to converge on adefinition of beauty but rather for each student to find examples, methods, and possibly widerprinciples that are meaningful to them. An individual student’s findings could potentially informor expand their appreciation for what engineering can be and accomplish, offer them places tointegrate engineering with their existing identities or interests, or influence career planning.After class, students are assigned to write reflections based on prompts
/users. Student groupscollaborated and communicated to the whole group about their motivations and perspectives fortheir design choices. The students then reflected on the possible value of their designs. Studentsthen wrote reflections that described the societal benefits of creating inclusive designs. Theirreflection pieces included thoughts on unconscious bias, challenging/disrupting beliefs, norms,habits and expectations that highlights problems behind oppressive worldviews, and socialinsight/imagination of what life is like for others considering social circumstances such as culturalidentity, privilege, and positionality. A self-reflection rubric is used to assess student self-reflectionsubmissions.Overall, this module enables educators to
indicated thatstudents were successfully able to use integration to determine the area of the plate (see Fig.1)but were unable to find its centroid. Common reasons given by the participants for this inabilitywere the lack of applications of centroids being taught or reinforced within the curriculum afterthey were initially taught. Student participants also displayed novice or rote approaches tosolving the problem rather than following what might be considered a more logical,“engineering” problem solving approach grounded in fundamental theory and governingequations. Both the faculty participants (n=2), as well as the single student (male, sophomore)who came closest to the correct answer, displayed significant reflective practices in evaluatingtheir
of Technology. ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2024 Socio-technical and culture-inspired projects in freshman engineering design course bring context and emotion to learningAbstractLearning is not an unemotional consideration of facts but emotion is integrally woven into theexperience of learning [1]. Situated cognition model [2] is a theoretical approach to learning thatsupports the idea that learning takes place when an individual is interactively doing somethingthrough situated activity that has social, cultural, and physical contexts. This paper presents post-activity reflections in student design projects with socio-technical and socio-culturalinterventions in a freshman design
benefits, and environmental sustainability.In response to these complex and interrelated challenges, The Sustainability and SocialEntrepreneurship (SSEF), a collaborative effort between the University of Waterloo in Canadaand Harvey Mudd College in the United States, launched its inaugural iteration in the summer of2023. The SSEF aims to foster innovative, human-centered, and sustainable urban designsolutions through interdisciplinary international collaboration. The SSEF reflects anunderstanding of the multifaceted nature of urban problems and seeks to bring together diverseperspectives and expertise to address these issues.The program was structured as a multi-week, multi-institutional pilot that brought together nineexceptional third-year
education. The specific objectives are to:identify characteristics indicative of thriving and successful mentorship practices within thisnetwork; recognize opportunities and barriers in future potential mentorship relationships; andidentify potential lines of inquiry for future work on mentorship social networks. Aspects ofinterest include motivation for being a mentor or mentee, benefits of being a mentor or mentee,mentorship relationship patterns related to the domain of educational leadership, and types ofmentorship methods. A survey featuring critical reflection prompts was distributed to tenindividuals, including mentors, mentees, and peer mentors associated with the primary node, whoalso completed the same survey for each connection. Through
practices, 5)provided coaching and expert support, 6) offered opportunities for feedback and reflection, and7) was of sustained duration [6].As specialists in renewable energy and data science, engineering faculty and graduate students aswell as industry advisors provided a content focus and model for effective practices inresearching specific STEM content areas. This was accomplished by giving teacher-participantshands-on active learning opportunities to explore the research process. Boz [5] found this type ofsupport was key to professional development that led teachers from theory to actualimplementation of practice. Education specialists provided coaching, support, and feedback forthe creation of content modules. Collaboration and sustained
majors, referred to in the project and hereafter asdesigners. The designers’ perspectives, as examples of students who had chosen a STEM careerpathway, was of interest. They had gained access to STEM as a field of study and the researcherswere interested in whether their own pathways would be reflected in the activities they weredesigning. The other stakeholder group involved in the planning year was a group of teacherswho would become the afterschool facilitators of the STEM program. Those individuals valuedSTEM and students’ access to it. As a group that provided input and feedback on the activitiesthat were being developed, the researchers were interested in how their experiences andperspectives may or may not be reflected in the afterschool
characterization of academic performance and competency have been topics of interestat all educational levels. Efforts generally include tests within major subject categories such as math,reading, and science with the diversity of categories increasing at higher educational levels. Suchtests result in a score (for individuals or aggregated across individuals) for each category that isintended to reflect “performance”; i.e., a level of competency or mastery within the defined subjectmatter area (SMA). While individual SMA scores are used as part of individual and groupperformance reports, single number “overall performance” metrics are frequently also used. Suchcomposite measures have traditionally been based on simple or weighted averaging. GeneralSystems
reflection [3].The service provided can take many forms. It may include a community project, communityeducation, or the administration of a community survey to understand what problems need to beaddressed [4]. The academic connection refers to the learning aspect students gain throughcoursework and hands-on experiences, and is oftentimes, multidisciplinary. The reciprocalpartnership between the university and the community partner must be beneficial for both. Onechallenge of service learning versus traditional capstone projects is that a meaningful, ongoingrelationship with the community must be maintained [4]. In addition, many projects cannot becompleted in a single course and need the buy-in from the local community to ensure their long-term
experience. To assess student perceptions of thenew curriculum intervention, reflections were collected and qualitatively analyzed resulting in 3overarching themes, including creativity in user-centered design, time management, andcommunication/collaboration. These themes demonstrate that students felt they acquired orexpanded skills that are considered vital in a work environment. Therefore, applying this projectexperience on a larger scale can alleviate some of the unpreparedness that engineering studentsfeel as they leave school and enter the workforce. The intervention details will be provided toencourage other engineering instructors to implement similar real-world learning strategies in thehigher education classroom.IntroductionMany
activity–has been identified as an essential component forinstructional effectiveness [5]-[7] with highlights to the experience of mastery and socialpersuasion [7],[8]. This suggests that effective support for faculty should consist of learningcommunities that build supportive relationships between members, encourage critical reflection,and include opportunities for research partnerships [9].Faculty Communities of PracticesIn work focusing on educational and leadership development, Drago-Steverson [10] shares thateffective faculty development experiences allow faculty to experience conditions that supportadult learners through meaningful shared activities. Such activities enable faculty to experiencetransformational learning–learning that grows
receivedendorsements through OSU’s Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning to create and sustaineducational environments that intentionally value inclusive excellence and advance equity.A key goal is to improve the negative climate culture that is often linked to the STEM fields andthe lack of representation. Through instruction design and culturally responsive pedagogy, ourteam creates learning environments that value diverse viewpoints and representation to teachingstudents to approach problem solving in a collaborative and culturally relevant way.At the Institutional level, OSU’s Shared Values speak to our mission as a community-engagedland grant university. Many initiatives reflect the commitment to justice, equity, diversity, andinclusion. Notable and
decades, research is still in its infancy within the discipline of engineering educationwith only one research team studying VTS on engineering students. In 2017, Campbell and hiscollaborators introduced VTS to upper-level engineering students in hopes of creating morereflective engineers [14]. A comparison of essay responses before and after the VTS experienceshowed that students were indeed more reflective afterward, though the essay prompt was relatedto the art they previously viewed rather than engineering concepts [14]. They expanded upontheir work with graduate engineering students using instrumentations for insight, contextualcompetence, reflective skepticism, and interdisciplinary skills [15] and using reflective prompts[16] [17] [18
and environmental justice issues, in general. Q5. It is important to learn about social and environmental justice in this class, to better recognize the connection between societal issues and STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) course content. Q6. I feel I have a responsibility to help find solutions to social and environmental injustice.The Reading, Writing, and Reflection AssignmentThe general topic for the activity was the government response to natural or anthropogenicdisasters in the U.S., taking into consideration the location of the event and the socioeconomicstatus of the affected community. The response was defined as the time it took the government torespond to the catastrophe and the resources that were deployed to help
disciplines, but rather require aninterdisciplinary approach. Originally conceptualized by Rittel & Webber [2], wicked problemsare problems with multiple stakeholders and competing demands, which often contain ethical,social, political, or environmental dimensions. They are challenging to frame and scope, giventhe lack of an obvious “stopping point” when the problem to solution process is complete.Wicked problems reflect pressing societal issues like climate change, transportation and urbandevelopment, healthcare and technological unemployment – problems that frequently engage thetechnical expertise of engineers but require a breadth of disciplinary knowledge outside ofengineering as well, requiring strong collaborative skills and an intellectual
by Dewey (1937) asa cyclical learning model in the education process with four components: concrete experience,reflection, abstraction, and application [5].Experiential learning refers to the transformation of experiences into applied knowledge [6] witha deliberate importance placed on the reflexive nature of learning [7]. Kolb’s experientiallearning theory is a noted example of a commonly cited learning theory presented in theliterature that maintains humanistic roots [8]. Experiential learning theory not only includes thecognitive aspects of learning, but also addresses one’s subjective experiences [9], defininglearning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”(Kolb, 1984, p. 41). This theory
Paper ID #42176Board 180: Impacting Engineering Students’ Perceptions of DEI ThroughReal-Life Narratives and In-Class Discussions with an Empathetic LensProf. Lisa K Davids, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University To continually improve the experience of the students in her courses, Lisa engages in applied pedagogical research, implementing research-based techniques in the classroom. Currently teaching Introduction to Engineering and Graphical Communications courses, Lisa has implemented active teaching techniques, team and project-based assignments, and emphasizes self-reflection in her students.Dr. Jeff R. Brown, Embry-Riddle
such as GPAs, scores in prior courses from which the knowledge is to betransferred, etc. To date however, this has not been done. Finally, the think aloud methodologyused in this study has been shown in the past to positively influence student performance suchthat this activity may overestimate actual student performance “in the field” (Gagne et al., 1962;Davis et al., 1968).4. Presentation of DataThis paper presents data taken from the analysis of a single interview from this study. In this casea faculty member in a mechanical engineering department was the participant. Two main themesemerged in the analysis of the data; (1) the extensive use of reflection by the participant inevaluating their problem solving approach and solution(s); (2) the
engineering-related scenarios, situations, or dilemmas. The students areassessed based on the following: (1) individual or team responses to the engineering-relatedscenarios, situations, or dilemmas discussed in teams in class; (2) a reflective paper on theengineering profession, (3) a peer-reviewed paper on addressing a professional dilemma inengineering, and (4) two team-based assignments—an infographic and a video. Students areassigned to teams randomly by the instructor at the start of the semester (a maximum of 6students per team) and work in the same team throughout the semester, i.e., for the in-classdiscussions and the two team-based assignments.To facilitate team building, students participate in a number of ice-breaking activities. Teams
junioryear in undergrad through the completion of a master's degree or through the completion of theirqualifying exam within a Ph.D. program, the program provides opportunities throughout todeeply engage students in reflecting on social issues. The goal of the program is to foster theprofessional development of S-STEM scholars to develop socially conscious engineers andengineering faculty who support students and come up with innovative solutions that meet thediverse needs of different populations.Socially Conscious ProgrammingUML’s S-STEM Program is halfway through the second cohort’s first year. The programmingdescribed was offered in the first year for the first cohort and is being offered to the secondcohort during their first year in the
students experience.” Such data can contextualize the design and the delivery ofthe intervention. To examine FOI, an LR-LS fidelity rubric was developed by the research teamto score faculty on five “critical components” [1] of the LR-LS framework: 1) STEM/academicliteracy, 2) affordances for student interaction, 3) orientations to student learning, 4) reflectivepractice, and 5) faculty leadership. Our FOI rubric was intended to capture the extent to whichLR-LS components were enacted during lesson study (quality measure). The five LR-LScomponents were measured using a four-point scale. A score of “0” means the component wasnot present, “1” reflects minimal implementation, “2” reflects moderate implementation, and “3”reflects strong
ofdesigning and building technologies. However, they do this within the context of unique placesand among distinct milieu that reflects its own engineering culture [8]. Thus, engineering cultureand the development of engineering identity is inextricably tied to the places that reproduce itand contains within it specific organizational patterns, embedded norms and routines, sharedbeliefs, and values that often mediate how students engage with faculty, staff, and one another.In short, culture cannot be decoupled from the place in which it is experienced and imparted.Extant research delineates visible manifestations of culture as “ways of doing things” within theclassroom and laboratory spaces—which often prioritizes the teaching and development
ethicalconsiderations before completing the main assignment. Following a class-wide lecture on ethics,it begins with an individual task to identify personal biases; next, it branches out into otherethical perspectives with a team-based task more realistically representing the viewpoints foundin real-world settings. Along with each task, students are required to reflect on their choices andethical positions.In the first, orienting task, a more traditional approach is taken wherein the students are guidedthrough a discussion of the classic trolley problem [12] as applied to the development of self-driving cars. Once students have responded to the question, “Would you save five people bychoosing to kill one?” the students are shown the TED talk, What moral
for students, midpoint and endpoint focus groups withstudents, and interviews with students’ mentors. Separately, Deters (Author 2) asked the cohort toparticipate in additional data collection for research purposes. The cohort was asked to do weeklyself-reflection with given prompts, and upon their return, each IRES scholar will be interviewedabout their IRES experience. These data will be analyzed in-depth over the next year. Preliminaryfindings from the student reflections are provided below.FindingsStudents’ reflection: what they learned by conducting research in JapanFor their final report, the IRES students, who are co-authors on this paper, were asked to reflectwhat they learned by conducting research in Japan, and what the biggest
reality and is characterized by varied factorsthat influence this gap to continue, even with the efforts of private, public, social, andeducational initiatives to reduce it. Among the factors are the preconceptions in relation toSTEM careers, gender stereotypes, family attitudes, lack of women leaders in these areas whoare an example to inspire or to mentorship. The lack of gender equity for women inengineering is a global problem that has implications for society, as it means losing theopportunity to have this talent that is in such high demand today. [6]This context that gives us the environment leads us to reflect on the initiatives that are beingcarried out globally to further promote and create this culture of gender equality, where
has been a prominent means to develop a global skillset [1].Since 2019, Penn State University’s College of Engineering has offered a three-week summerstudy abroad program to develop global competencies through a technical communication coursepaired with a cultural course in a Como, Italy. In 2023, the faculty employed innovations to bothprepare participants for their sojourn while enhancing the potential to foster global competencies.An asynchronous, remote pre-departure course primed students before departure. They wereintroduced to the language and culture of the region, including using tools/ assignments such asrecording dialogues, and reflections, engaging with natives through a digital cultural exchangeplatform, and creating individual