2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Qualitative Insight into User Experiences of an Intelligent Tutoring System to Learn Sketching Skills.

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 14

Sketching is a valuable skill for many engineering students to support the development of various auxiliary skills such as refined spatial visualization, problem-solving, idea generation, and communication. As the students engage in the engineering design process, sketching skills, along with the auxiliary skills, become valuable tools in future courses and continually in their careers. Explicitly teaching students to sketch is challenging given the instructor-to-student ratio. Hence, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are highly beneficial to students in this context to develop these skills actively rather than expect students to develop these skills independently through the needs of other courses. An ITS was introduced through this study to teach sketching skills to students in mechanical engineering courses. The basics of Two-point perspective sketching were the focus of the instruction material facilitated by this ITS. The tutoring platform provides individualized automatic feedback to students immediately after they complete a sketch to inform them of their performance and ultimately to enhance their sketching skill development. This study aims to understand the experiences of graduate and undergraduate mechanical engineering students from three institutions learning sketching through the ITS environment. Our study is guided by the following research questions: 1. What was the engineering student's experience in learning to sketch in an intelligent tutoring platform? 2. What are the strengths, weaknesses, and suggestions for improving the intelligent tutoring system? 3. What are the impacts of the intelligent tutoring System on the sketching self-efficacy of engineering students?
In this study, researchers collected data through surveys and semi-structured interviews. The participants were students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate Mechanical Engineering courses at three different institutions where they learned and practiced sketching using the ITS. This study helps us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the ITS, along with suggestions for how to improve the software from an engineering student perspective. The user experiences of mechanical engineering students were valuable to understand if and how students are finding this particular ITS helpful in their academic lives. The results of the study will be useful to researchers and the engineering education community working to develop educational software tools, to better understand student expectations, and educators interested in identifying a way to incorporate sketching.

Authors

Ms. Donna Jaison Texas A&M University [biography]

Donna Jaison is a PhD student with Dr. Karan Watson and Dr. Tracy Hammond in the Multidisciplinary Engineering Department at Texas A&M College Station. She is a Graduate research assistant at the Institute of Engineering Education and Innovation(IEEI) at Texas A&M University.
Dr. Hillary E. Merzdorf Texas A&M University [biography]

Hillary Merzdorf is a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University with the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation. Her research interests are in assessment methods with both learning analytics and traditional psychometrics, spatial reasoning in engineering, and cognitive psychology of student-technology interactions.
Mr. Lance Leon Allen White http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1172-0500 Texas A&M University [biography]

Lance L.A. White is a Ph.D. candidate at Texas A&M University in Interdisciplinary Engineering housed within the Multidisciplinary Engineering department with a thrust in Engineering Education. He is working as a graduate research assistant at the Institute of Engineering Education and Innovation at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station. His research centers on diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in the context of Engineering in higher education. His dissertation work is looking at Engineering degree program curricula to understand impacts of institution types and commitment to servingness of underrepresented populations in engineering. He is trained in both qualitative and quantitative research and plans to pursue a tenure-track faculty position in the near future. His dissertation chair is Dr. Karan Watson and he is working under thr director of IEEI Dr. Tracy Hammond.
Dr. Kerrie A. Douglas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2693-5272 Cornell University [biography]

Dr. Douglas is an Associate Professor in the Purdue School of Engineering Education. Her research is focused on improving methods of assessment in engineering learning environments and supporting engineering students.
Dr. Karan Watson P.E. Texas A&M University [biography]

Karan L. Watson, Ph.D., P.E., is currently a Regents Senior Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, having joined the faculty at Texas A&M University in 1983 as an Assistant Professor. She is also serving as the C0-Director of the Institute
Dr. Tracy Anne Hammond http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-7272-0507 Texas A&M University [biography]

Dr. Hammond is Director of the Texas A&M University Institute for Engineering Education & Innovation and also the chair of the Engineering Education Faculty. She is also Director of the Sketch Recognition Lab and Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. She is a member of the Center for Population and Aging, the Center for Remote Health Technologies & Systems as well as the Institute for Data Science. Hammond is a PI for over 13 million in funded research, from NSF, DARPA, Google, Microsoft, and others. Hammond holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and FTO (Finance Technology Option) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and four degrees from Columbia University: an M.S in Anthropology, an M.S. in Computer Science, a B.A. in Mathematics, and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Physics. Hammond advised 17 UG theses, 29 MS theses, and 10 Ph.D. dissertations. Hammond is the 2020 recipient of the TEES Faculty Fellows Award and the 2011 recipient of the Charles H. Barclay, Jr. '45 Faculty Fellow Award. Hammond has been featured on the Discovery Channel and other news sources. Hammond is dedicated to diversity and equity, which is reflected in her publications, research, teaching, service, and mentoring. More at http://srl.tamu.edu and http://ieei.tamu.edu.

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