2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As the United States continues to evolve from an industrial economy to a global economy, a significantly higher level of education for larger proportions of society has become a necessity; for each individual and for the collective benefit of all. This trend has multiple direct implications for higher education and is particularly important for engineering workforce development. Demand for employment-relevant, technologically focused university programs is ever increasing, raising questions as to whether the U.S. postsecondary education system can continue to effectively respond.

Higher education researchers have noted increasing difficulties in students as they transition from K-12 experiences to colleges and universities, and especially for transitions taking place in research universities in engineering and in other STEM fields. This transitional phenomenon has become pronouncedly more challenging as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the majority of high school students attended their last year or two of high school remotely.

Researchers who study college transitions posit that students often become lost when they are required to exhibit independence and navigate college during their first year without the watchful, anticipatory guidance of their parents and high school teachers. Their grades often plummet, which is particularly pronounced when students encounter the rigor of STEM curricular content. To address this dilemma, engineering schools have developed first-year programs to support students in navigating through and succeeding in their first year in college. Many of these programs contain remediation experiences, tutoring programs, and summer bridge skill oriented programs. These programs’ successes have been quite variable and are typically modest when brought to scale. Furthermore, there is sparse research that indicates such programs’ longitudinal impact on students’ career preparedness.

In contrast to the remedial or discrete skill bolstering first year efforts prescribed by many colleges and universities, our research reports on a comprehensive first year engineering program in which students enroll in a Freshman Academy in which they engage in project-based pedagogy utilizing a makerspace experience. The goal of the program is to provide the students with a hands-on engineering experience from the first week they enroll in college with an intent to provide the students with “real life” engineering experiences that align with their other technical courses so they can be fully engaged in working with peers and connect course content with that which will occur once they enter the engineering professions.

The students in the described Freshman Academy program are grouped across the engineering disciplines and work in cross-disciplinary teams on a semester-long team project that addresses a student selected National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenge (NAE) or United Nations (UN) Sustainable Communities Goal. Through this process, the student teams develop a prototype to address a problem associated with a NAE or UN global challenge. The teams engage in societally relevant engineering design processes and complete a four component team project consisting of (1) a multimedia project pitch, (2) a project report, (3) a team presentation, and (4) a physical prototype to address their selected challenge using design principles through work within a makerspace.

For this engineering education research, we address the following questions: (1) What is the relationship between the students’ previous design and technical experiences to their success in makerspace project-based learning? (2) What role do team dynamics play in the success of their team projects? and (3) In what ways do students’ team dynamics change as they near completion of their team projects. To measure the impact of the Freshman Academy team experience in the makerspace, we utilize a set of multidimensional rubrics to assess the four team project components. We also collect students’ background and experiential information during the semester. Furthermore, we collect information about the students’ description of their team dynamics, strengths and challenges.

This is considered “work in progress” engineering education research. Accordingly, formative results of the research indicate the following. The participating students have a variety of precursing experiences as they enter their undergraduate engineering programs. They are able to successfully navigate the team experience and complete a pitch, report, presentation, and prototype to address a contemporary global engineering problem. The projects demonstrate design thinking/iteration, societally relevant innovation, ethics, and understanding of the value of teamwork and collaboration. The strengths of the teams assist students in successful project completion. Additional results of the research are forthcoming as the semester culminates, and will be reported on in the full paper which will accompany this abstract.