External Representation Design-for-Sustainability Intervention in an Engineering Graphics Course

Raghu Pucha; Kata Dosa; Meltem Alemdar; Sunni Haag Newton

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Conference: 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Tampa, Florida
Publication Date: June 15, 2019
Start Date: June 15, 2019
End Date: June 19, 2019
Conference Session: Engineering Design Graphics Division Technical Session 2 - Design & Manufacturing Topics
Tagged Division: Engineering Design Graphics
Page Count: 8
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--32828
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/32828
Download Count: 430

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Paper Authors

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Raghu Pucha Georgia Institute of Technology

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Dr. Raghu Pucha is a Senior Lecturer at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, in the area of CAD/CAE and Manufacturing. Dr. Pucha teaches computer graphics and design courses at Georgia Tech., and conducts research in the area of developing computational tools for the design, analysis and manufacturing of advanced materials and systems. Dr. Pucha has three provisional U.S. patents and co-authored over 60 research papers. He is honored with Undergraduate Educator Award in 2012 and Geoffrey G. Eichholz Faculty Teaching Award in 2015 from the Center for Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Georgia Tech.

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Kata Dosa Georgia Institute of Technology

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Dr. Kata Dosa is a postdoctoral scholar in the Center for Teaching and Learning. She earned her Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Dosa conducted discipline-based education research looking at environmental decision-making and reasoning processes. During this time, she also completed the DELTA Certificate for Research, Teaching and Learning. Dosa holds a master's degree in environmental science and environmental biology from Eotvos Lorand University. She is currently working on developing workshops for faculty and graduate students, and supports future faculty and teaching assistant development programs. Dosa's current research interests are teaching-as-research, incorporating sustainability across the curriculum, team science, and competency development in higher education.

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Meltem Alemdar Georgia Institute of Technology

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Dr. Meltem Alemdar is Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at Georgia Tech's Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC). Dr. Alemdar has experience evaluating programs that fall under the umbrella of educational evaluation, including K-12 educational curricula, K-12 STEM programs after-school programs, and comprehensive school reform initiatives. Across these evaluations, she has used a variety of evaluation methods, ranging from a multi-level evaluation plan designed to assess program impact to methods such as program monitoring designed to facilitate program improvement. She received her Ph.D. in Research, Measurement and Statistics from the Department of Education Policy at Georgia State University (GSU).

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Sunni Haag Newton Georgia Institute of Technology

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Sunni Newton is currently a Research Associate II at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC). Her research focuses on assessing the implementation and outcomes of educational interventions at the K-12 and collegiate levels. She received her MS and Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Georgia Tech in 2009 and 2013, respectively.

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Abstract

Georgia Tech has recently launched a campus-wide academic initiative aimed at preparing undergraduate students in all engineering majors to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to contribute to the major societal challenge of creating sustainable communities. This paper presents ongoing sustainability intervention strategies in an engineering graphics course with a contextualized project-based approach. University training in problem solving is primarily done using de-contextualized textbook problems with a one-size-fits-all approach in exploring subject domain’s concepts. Teaching abstracted concepts as well-defined independent entities leads to learning with fixed meaning and immutable concepts. A situated approach to teaching and learning is used in this course, where concept, authentic activity and context guide student learning to produce usable, robust knowledge. Situated cognition leads to negotiable meaning and socially constructed understanding of the domain’s concepts. A socio-technical project-based teaching model with contextualized design problems are currently being used to engage students throughout the course that incorporate structural conditions and sustainability through both individual and team projects.

Human wasteful behavior patterns are cognitively easier to perform but to change that behavior, incentives alone to motivate people to make good choices are not sufficient but increased cognitive effort is required to persist with good choices and actions day after day for sustainable resource use. Designs with external representation to improve the decision process using distributed cognition theories in structured problem-domains has been studied in the past to reduce the cognitive load of individuals or groups (ex: speed bugs in aircraft cockpit display / control design). Application of distributed cognition in the design of products with external representation to promote sustainability is still in its infancy as the design problem-domain is unstructured. Product design with external representations promoting sustainable resource-use, are intended to (i) make hidden information explicit in the design, (ii) motivate people to make decisions that sustain resources, and (iii) help people persist with this behavior by lowering the cognitive load involved in sustainability decisions.

This paper presents various interventions, in an experimental section of the course, related to student projects on environmental sustainability that involve product designs with external representations. A detailed description of pedagogical approaches to learning, strategies , implementation and assessment of intervention activities, student reflections, pre and post-survey data results and lessons learned are presented.

Citation
Format

Pucha, R., & Dosa, K., & Alemdar, M., & Newton, S. H. (2019, June), External Representation Design-for-Sustainability Intervention in an Engineering Graphics Course Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32828

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Georgia Tech has recently launched a campus-wide academic initiative aimed at preparing undergraduate students in all engineering majors to use their disciplinary knowledge and skills to contribute to the major societal challenge of creating sustainable communities. This paper presents ongoing sustainability intervention strategies in an engineering graphics course with a contextualized project-based approach. University training in problem solving is primarily done using de-contextualized textbook problems with a one-size-fits-all approach in exploring subject domain’s concepts. Teaching abstracted concepts as well-defined independent entities leads to learning with fixed meaning and immutable concepts. A situated approach to teaching and learning is used in this course, where concept, authentic activity and context guide student learning to produce usable, robust knowledge. Situated cognition leads to negotiable meaning and socially constructed understanding of the domain’s concepts. A socio-technical project-based teaching model with contextualized design problems are currently being used to engage students throughout the course that incorporate structural conditions and sustainability through both individual and team projects. 

Human wasteful behavior patterns are cognitively easier to perform but to change that behavior, incentives alone to motivate people to make good choices are not sufficient but increased cognitive effort is required to persist with good choices and actions day after day for sustainable resource use. Designs with external representation to improve the decision process using distributed cognition theories in structured problem-domains has been studied in the past to reduce the cognitive load of individuals or groups (ex: speed bugs in aircraft cockpit display / control design). Application of distributed cognition in the design of products with external representation to promote sustainability is still in its infancy as the design problem-domain is unstructured. Product design with external representations promoting sustainable resource-use, are intended to (i) make hidden information explicit in the design, (ii) motivate people to make decisions that sustain resources, and (iii) help people persist with this behavior by lowering the cognitive load involved in sustainability decisions.

This paper presents various interventions, in an experimental section of the course, related to student projects on environmental sustainability that involve product designs with external representations. A detailed description of pedagogical approaches to learning, strategies , implementation and assessment of intervention activities, student reflections, pre and post-survey data results and lessons learned are presented. 

AU  - Raghu Pucha
AU  - Kata Dosa
AU  - Meltem Alemdar
AU  - Sunni Haag Newton
CY  - Tampa, Florida
DA  - 2019/06/15
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - External Representation Design-for-Sustainability Intervention in an Engineering Graphics Course
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/32828
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--32828
ER  -