2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering summer camps, which allow pre-college-aged students to participate in authentic design tasks, provide opportunity to experience topics or activities that may not be offered at school. These opportunities can help students to diversify their learning and explore personal interests. In this research-to-practice study, we developed and implemented a week-long camp that guided 31 high school students (15 female) through a collaborative human-centered design task while exploring the relationship between engineering and design. Human-centered design (HCD), or design thinking, is an important characteristic of the future direction of engineering education. Indeed, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) includes teamwork and empathic thinking among its student outcomes. Literature has defined six human-centered design mindsets, including the collaborative mindset, which is characterized by the belief that collaboration is a key component of problem solving. Our previous work has stressed the importance and impactfulness of fostering collaboration in engineering education; in the same vein, we structured our camp activities around the collaborative mindset. We used ethnographic observations and pre-/post-test surveys to understand the impact of our camp on students’ awareness of and interest in engineering careers, as well as their understanding of the role of HCD in engineering. Findings indicated that understanding of HCD significantly increased and that campers also gained a better understanding of the field of engineering and could make a more informed decision regarding engineering as a potential career path. Upcoming work will more deeply explore the story of the camp and its outcomes, especially regarding the collaborative (i.e., teamwork) mindset.