2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Presently, too much university writing instruction is provided in stand-alone writing courses where students are asked to learn skills divorced from the context in which the skills are expected to be used. In many technical writing courses, for example, the instructor aims to teach generalized technical writing skills without knowing the future contexts in which the students will need to apply the skills. As a result, students learn and practice skills in an artificial setting. While they are given guidance on applying the skills in new environments, this guidance remains divorced from the wide array of technical writing scenarios they find themselves in. Compounding the problem, professors in the students’ majors are rarely aware of what is taught previously by professors in technical writing. As a result, disciplinary professors often struggle to help students adapt to the demands of their new context.

In his book Situated Language and Learning, James Gee highlights an alternative to this approach in what he calls a “fish tank” model. A fish tank model is a learning model where skills are learned in a “simplified environment that lets one appreciate an ecosystem . . . by stripping away a good deal of the complexity, but keeping enough to bring out some basic and important relationships” (65). The “basic skills” of a more complex enterprise are taught in a way that allows a player “to actually start playing and learning from playing” (62). Gee’s fish tank model can be successfully applied to the learning and practice of writing and oral communication skills in engineering courses in a way that allows technical writing and engineering professors to make content easily transferrable across the curriculum.

Building from their previous 2021 Zone 4 ASEE paper, the authors adopt Gee’s fish tank model of education to develop a “cornerstone” design experience that provides first-year engineering students with a complete but scaled-down version of what is done in their engineering capstone courses. The authors have combined a first-year Computer Aided Design (CAD) class with a Technical Report Writing class to mimic the capstone experience in a scaled environment, as all mechanical and aerospace engineering capstone courses are presently team-taught by engineering and communication faculty.

In the cornerstone course, two engineering design projects provide students with the context to learn and practice engineering-specific written and oral communication skills they will need in their senior year. With both projects, students learn SolidWorks CAD modeling tools, formal drawing standards, and design for manufacturability.

The written and oral presentation assignments mirror what students complete in the capstone courses. In the cornerstone course, students write a RFP and multiple design proposals. As part of a team project, students present a Design Concept Review, which is followed by a Preliminary Design Review for which they are expected to have CAD models of their design. The project culminates with a Critical Design Review (CDR) in which students show compliance with the design requirements. The CDR is accompanied by a complete drawing package along with a final report.

This approach asks students from the beginning of their first year to see themselves as apprentice engineers. In addition to learning to communicate as an engineer, first year students are exposed to engineering topics and analysis methods they will encounter in their future undergraduate studies. Project-specific lessons from material science, solid mechanics, and heat transfer are targeted to their projects. In this way, they are asked to start thinking like an engineer so that they can learn to communicate like an engineer.

The authors have found that first year students are surprisingly capable of grasping and communicating advanced engineering topics. Their presentations and reports often describe their design solutions more clearly and trace the solution to design requirements more effectively than some senior capstone presentations and reports.