2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In this poster, we report about a study which was done during the implementation of the ongoing project entitled “Building a Youth-Led Learning Community through Automating Hydroponic Systems” funded by the NSF-ITEST program. Computational thinking (CT) has been one of the most fore-fronted educational themes being pushed by NGSS in recent times. But, unfortunately, many students, especially from traditionally less-privileged and historically excluded populations, usually do not get much exposure to the concepts like “coding” or “programming” in their classrooms. Coders/Programmers are often considered as “Software Engineers”, but many students possess a relatively naive idea about “Engineering” and do not see the connection between coding with engineering. In many middle and high schools, there are not separate engineering classes, and to get engineering taught, teachers usually embed the concepts of engineering in the existing science classes. In this interdisciplinary project, high-schoolers and middle-schoolers learned to code, built a greenhouse, used different sensors to obtain environmental data, and used these data to control different aspects of the greenhouse to keep plants healthy. Moreover, they learned about 3-D printing and laser cutting skills which were used in the greenhouse setup. Here, the students got exposure to physical computing aspects of coding, as well as could familiarize themselves with the concepts of engineering. In this context, we investigated participating high-school students’ understanding of “Engineering”, and tried to understand how they perceive the relationship between coding and engineering.

Twenty-Five (25) high-schoolers participated in the February Vacation Camp (2022) at a Middle School situated in a suburban area at the North-East part of the US. The responses were collected from fifteen (15) high-schoolers in a pre-interview session after getting their permissions. During the interviews, students were asked about how they understand the term “Engineering” and whether/how they act as an engineer in their daily lives. These questions were asked to get a deeper understanding about their perceptions about engineering. Afterwards, their interviews were transcribed and the responses related to engineering and coding were extracted from the transcripts for further analysis.

Our initial findings suggest that many high-schoolers associated engineering mostly with building, making, repairing, or improving an object or device. While talking about these ideas, some of them emphasized on solving problems for the betterment of the people. Moreover, it was interesting to find that, though most of the students were not associating coding with engineering, some students explicitly linked engineering with coding. We hope to do more in-depth analyses on students’ responses in the future.

We believe that our paper will provide data on typical high-schoolers’ understanding and perceptions about “Engineering” and “coding”, and their sense-making about the relationship between coding and engineering. Possible implications of our paper can be emphasizing more engineering and coding aspects in the existing science curriculum and helping teachers to incorporate these concepts in their classrooms, so that high-schoolers acquire a better idea about engineering and the relationship between coding and engineering.