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Assessing the Effectiveness of Open-ended Engineering Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Programming Course for Improving Students’ Problem-Solving Styles

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Programming Education 1

Tagged Division

Computers in Education Division (COED)

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/46616

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Paper Authors

biography

John Alexander Mendoza-Garcia University of Florida Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4943-6222

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John Mendoza Garcia serves as an Instructional Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering Education within the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Education at Purdue University, and his Master's and a Bachelor's in Systems and Computing Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes, in Colombia, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia respectively. He teaches and investigates the development of professional skills such as problem-solving, systems thinking, and design thinking. He worked in Industry before transitioning to academia.

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Abstract

Engineering students must develop problem-solving skills as a foundation to build on the ABET student learning outcomes, especially 1 and 2, asking for abilities to “identify, formulate and solve complex engineering problems…” and “apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs…” Therefore, it is relevant to nurture students’ problem-solving skills. This study assesses students’ problem-solving style improvement (using the terminology proposed by Zurilla et al. (2009)) after addressing an open-ended engineering design problem in a Computer Programming class, and it is compared to an approach in which students are given a close-ended problem. For assessing students’ problem-solving styles, students were asked to take the social problem-solving survey developed by Zurilla et al. (2009) on the first week of classes as a pre-test and then at the end of the course as a post-test. Zurilla et al.’s survey provides a score for students’ problem-solving styles such as Avoidance, impulsivity, Positive Problem Orientation, and Rational Problem Solving, among others. In this study, students who received the intervention (open-ended design project) took the class in the spring and fall of 2021, and the control group (close-ended programming project assignment) were the students who took the course in the spring and fall of 2022. The same instructor taught all the sections. Preliminary results show higher values in the problem-solving styles Positive Problem Orientation and Rational Problem solving in students’ courses where they completed an open-ended design project than in the condition in which students were asked to address a close-ended problem.

Mendoza-Garcia, J. A. (2024, June), Assessing the Effectiveness of Open-ended Engineering Design Projects in a First-Year Engineering Programming Course for Improving Students’ Problem-Solving Styles Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/46616

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