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Relating Student Participation in University Maker Spaces to their Engineering Design Self-Efficacy

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Conference

2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

New Orleans, Louisiana

Publication Date

June 26, 2016

Start Date

June 26, 2016

End Date

June 29, 2016

ISBN

978-0-692-68565-5

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

Maker Spaces within the University

Tagged Division

Design in Engineering Education

Page Count

13

DOI

10.18260/p.26070

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/26070

Download Count

1593

Paper Authors

biography

Ricardo Jose Morocz

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Ricardo graduated with honors from the University of Florida with a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in May of 2014. He started his Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Fall of 2014. He joined the Innovation, Design Reasoning, Engineering Education, and Methods (IDREEM) Lab. Ricardo is currently working on measuring the impact of university maker spaces like the Invention Studio on students' retention in STEM related field, creativity, and engineering design confidence.

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Bryan Levy Georgia Institute of Technology

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Craig Forest Georgia Institute of Technology

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Craig Forest is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech where he also holds program faculty positions in Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering. He is a Fellow at the Allen Brain Institute in Seattle WA and he is one of the inaugural recipients of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Grants, a national research effort to invent the next generation of neuroscience and neuroengineering tools. He is cofounder/organizer of one of the largest undergraduate invention competitions in the US—The InVenture Prize, and founder/organizer of one of the largest student-run prototyping facilities in the US—The Invention Studio. He was named Engineer of the Year in Education for the state of Georgia (2013).

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Robert L. Nagel James Madison University

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Dr. Robert Nagel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at James Madison University. Dr. Nagel joined the James Madison University after completing his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Oregon State University. He has a B.S. from Trine University and a M.S. from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, both in mechanical engineering. Since joining James Madison University, Nagel has helped to develop and teach the six course engineering design sequence which represents the spine of the curriculum for the Department of Engineering. The research and teaching interests of Dr. Nagel tend to revolve around engineering design and engineering design education, and in particular, the design conceptualization phase of the design process. He has performed research with the US Army Chemical Corps, General Motors Research and Development Center, and the US Air Force Academy, and he has received grants from the NSF, the EPA, and General Motors Corporation.

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Wendy C Newstetter Georgia Institute of Technology

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Dr Wendy C. Newstetter is the Director of Educational Research and Innovation in the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech.

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Kimberly Grau Talley P.E. Texas State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-6235-0706

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Dr. Kimberly G. Talley is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Technology, Senior Research Fellow and Maker Space Co-Director for the LBJ Institute for STEM Education and Research at Texas State University, and a licensed Professional Engineer. She received her Ph.D. and M.S.E. from the University of Texas at Austin in Structural Engineering. Her undergraduate degrees in History and in Construction Engineering and Management are from North Carolina State University. Dr. Talley teaches courses in the Construction Science and Management Program, and her research focus is in student engagement and retention in engineering and engineering technology education. Contact: kgt5@txstate.edu

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Julie S Linsey Georgia Institute of Technology

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Dr. Julie S. Linsey is an Assistant Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technological. Dr. Linsey received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas. Her research area is design cognition including systematic methods and tools for innovative design with a particular focus on concept generation and design-by-analogy. Her research seeks to understand designers’ cognitive processes with the goal of creating better tools and approaches to enhance engineering design. She has authored over 100 technical publications including twenty-three journal papers, five book chapters, and she holds two patents.

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Abstract

Characterizing Student Makers: Identifying Differences between Makers and Non-Users

For new engineers to succeed in today’s competitive global economy, engineering education has to foster innovation and creativity in students. The rapid growth of university maker spaces across the country has created an opportunity to combine textbook with hands-on engineering education. With their culture of collaboration, multidisciplinary acceptance, and hands-on learning, we believe that these spaces provide the perfect environment for students to develop their design self-efficacy, ability to innovate, and creativity in design.

This paper focuses on characterizing university maker space’s users and non-users in terms of their engineering design self-efficacy. The results presented in this paper are part of a longitudinal study and will be used to measure the impact of these unique learning environments on the students’ engineering design self-efficacy over time. To have a clear definition between maker space users and non-users, a survey was developed and implemented to capture a student’s level of participation. Concurrently, a survey instrument designed by Carberry et al. (2010) was used to gather the student’s engineering design self-efficacy scores. Both surveys were used to collect data from a freshman level engineering design course during the spring and fall semesters of 2015. The participants were classified in two groups according to their level of participation, and were compared in terms of their engineering design self-efficacy scores. The results from this comparison show that the students with higher participation are more motivated and less anxious to perform engineering design related tasks.

Based on these results, we theorize that academic institutions and introductory engineering design courses could play a key role in stimulating students to participate in university maker spaces. Since anxiety to perform engineering design tasks could be considered a significant barrier preventing students from participating, instructors should highlight the non-threatening and collaborative nature of maker spaces. We postulate that as this barrier is reduced, more students will begin to participate, which ultimately will result in higher number of students taking advantage of maker spaces as hands-on learning environments and gaining design experience.

Morocz, R. J., & Levy, B., & Forest, C., & Nagel, R. L., & Newstetter, W. C., & Talley, K. G., & Linsey, J. S. (2016, June), Relating Student Participation in University Maker Spaces to their Engineering Design Self-Efficacy Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana. 10.18260/p.26070

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