2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

An interdisciplinary robotics mentorship program was initiated in the Fall of 2019 as a two-semester pilot project to study soft skill development in undergraduate engineering students. The primary objective of this program is to design and implement an effective learning model to foster engineering students’ development of soft skills through collaboration with students in education major.
The mentorship model comprises three actively engaged groups: undergraduate engineering students, adolescence mathematics teacher candidates, and high school members of an after-school robotics club. Through alternating series of internal planning sessions at the university and engineering workshops at the high school, the volunteering engineering students co-designed STEM-topic workshops with the education students, implemented the activity in the robotics club, and received feedback from education students for improvement. These workshops include topics like CAD design, 3D printing, microcontrollers, coding, and engineering notebooks to expand high school students’ STEM interests, as well as for robot building and competition.
Results of the pilot study demonstrated that cross-disciplinary collaboration and interaction effectively enhance engineering soft skill development, particularly in Presentation, Teamwork, and Leadership. For example, the three-way approach provides additional teamwork aspects with shared expertise from an educational perspective. Based on the challenge and findings from the pilot study, the program structure has evolved each year for the ensuing two academic years to strategically reinforce the interaction among the three groups, particularly across the college engineering and education disciplines, and help enhance development of the evaluated soft skills.
For example, after the one-year suspension of the program due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the second phase of the mentorship program was redesigned to accommodate the team project approach for the high school robotics club. The approach provided a structure where individual teams of three high school students were encouraged to design, create, and revise their own STEM projects with a set budget. Through the iterative design approach, the engineering and education students had more opportunities to interact, communicate and engage with the high school students by providing guidance and advice, in ways that empowered the high school students to take initiative and ownership of their learning beyond the robotic competition.
In this paper, we will describe and explain the design consideration and approach to our program revision beyond the pilot study, and then identify the issues and success unique to this cross-disciplinary robotics mentorship program in fostering engineering soft skill development as it entered the third phase in Fall 2022. We will report on our analysis results of survey and interview data from 22 participants of college engineering or education students. Discussions will be focused on the soft skill development outcomes assessed through surveys and interviews from the participating students over the first two years, implementation of the team design projects and its effectiveness, and lessons learned and opportunities for broader impact in the future.