2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Developing a Curiosity Mindset in Engineering Undergraduates Via Hands-On, Inquiry-Based Learning Activities with Hidden Discoveries

In a world full of rapidly developing new technologies, it is critical that engineers develop their sense of curiosity so that they are prepared - and excited - to continue to learn throughout their careers. An engineer who is curious about technology will be intrinsically motivated to engage in life-long learning. Indeed, it is an ABET requirement that engineering students recognize the need for life-long learning, but in addition to recognizing this need we wished to increase the likelihood for engineers to indeed engage in a life-long activity throughout their careers. Accordingly, to promote intrinsic motivation for life-long learning, we developed a series of inquiry-based activities promoting curiosity in an upper-division mechanical engineering senior design course. Our method includes three components. First, we explicitly introduced the value of curiosity in engineering and created assignments that prevented students from treating lab components as a “black boxes”, but rather required understanding of how they work. The second method was mechanical dissection, where students took apart and discovered how a gearbox, encoder, and potentiometer worked. In the third method, students are challenged to discover a “hidden” factor that will improve their theoretical model to better match with experimental results. This upper division design class with 131 students, and students were surveyed at the beginning of the class, and after the curiosity focused activities in week 6. The survey showed that after the class exercises 83% of the students were somewhat or much more interested in using theory in engineering design, 79% were somewhat or much more interested in understanding the physics of how things work, and 76% of the students were somewhat or much more inclined to take things apart. Demographic differences were observed. More than twice as many students from Under-Represented Minorities (URMs) had not taken anything apart prior to the class; 40% for URM students vs 18% for non-URM students. In terms of gender, 30% of female students compared to 20% of the male students had not taken any objects apart prior to the class. Discovering the hidden factor proved to be a challenging yet rewarding activity; only 35% of the students discovered the challenge on their own, but overall, 83% did discover the challenges with help from other students. Student comments expressed how inquiry-based activities promoting curiosity are valued by students.