2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Motivation: This WIP paper looks at the design of a set of honors first-year engineering projects that are centered around engineering disciplines such as bioengineering, biomedical engineering, environmental engineering, and chemical engineering. Many of the first-year engineering honors projects at [omitted] focus on contexts and skills that students see as directly related to engineering disciplines such as mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. Because of this, many of the students interested in other disciplines struggle to see how the content of the course relates to other fields of engineering they are interested in. Research has shown that giving students contexts in which they are familiar and interested can help tremendously with self-efficacy and engagement in the classroom. The hope of this research is that by giving students new and interesting context to their coursework projects we can increase student interest, self-efficacy, and resilience through their first-year honors engineering experience.
Background: The first-year engineering honors program at [omitted] prepares students to go into all disciplines of engineering across the university. However, many of the projects in the course currently tie into topics that are commonly seen as related to mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering. Yet many of our students go into other disciplines such as biological, chemical, biomedical, environmental, and industrial engineering. Research indicates that students when faced with this situation feel that engineering might not be for them, or that they need to just get through it to get to topics in which they are actually interested. The goal of this research is to design and test parallel projects for the course that evaluate the same learning objectives while also exposing students to how the projects relate to their hopeful future engineering disciplines in areas such as chemical, biological, environmental, or industrial. The first-year engineering course has three projects, with each focused on specific learning objectives around design, programming, and mathematical modeling. Other topics such as engineering ethics, professional communication, and technical writing are also woven into the project learning objectives.
Methods: The authors begin by overviewing the existing course and the current projects that are being utilized along with the learning objectives. Currently the course uses a simple catapult project to teach design concepts, a solar energy project to teach mathematical modeling and programming, and a final robotics project to reinforce the design and programming learning objectives. Next, the design of the new projects are discussed and are compared to the existing projects in the course, and with a discussion of how students will achieve the same learning objectives. Additionally, each project is tied to certain disciplines and how it relates to common problems that occur in that specific field of engineering. In future semesters, these alternate projects will be deployed into a separate section of the course with students able to choose which track of projects they would like to complete their first year. The research design is also discussed, using existing survey instruments to look at how students self-efficacy, interest, and intentions to continue in engineering change over the semester in both courses with results compared.
Results: The anticipated results will illuminate whether a parallel course design, such as the one we are hoping to achieve, will help students with a diverse set of interests better engage and feel confident with the learning objectives of the course. While we are still early in the process, future work will involve deploying the designed interventions and surveying students experiences as they go through the process of completing the projects. In addition to this, benefits and challenges of deploying two parallel sets of projects to the same learning objectives will be discussed for other practitioners who are hoping to implement similar mechanics into their programs.