2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Although communicating is a skill that humans practice since early in life, humans struggle when trying to communicate feelings, perceptions, end even more complex ideas. Research shows that engineers struggle when it comes to communicate technical ideas, even more to audiences outside of such technical knowledge. There are many efforts to support the development of the communicating skill. This project aims to collaborate in such direction by getting engineering students to communicate simple ideas in a concise manner to a broad general audience. Particularly, the researchers included a communication project as class credit. For this, researchers asked students to make a 1 min video explaining an assigned class topic. The video is a TikTok format that will be uploaded in a class account in such social media, with the setting of “public audience”. A TikTok video includes specific characteristics such as entertaining, catchy, fun to watch videos. If one of the videos went viral, students will get extra credit in the class. This communication project was applied to three courses in civil engineering (Structures, Cost engineering, and Construction management), with a total of 51 students. At the end of the semester, researchers conducted a survey to learn students’ perceptions and feelings regarding the assignment, and the challenges they faced making such video. The results indicate students find short fun videos are challenging to communicate a technical idea and practicing making one helped them to find new ways to communicate. The authors discuss the possible factors driving the results, next steps and explore the avenues academia could take to improve communicating science. Implications for research and practice are provided.