2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 394: Supporting Secondary Students’ Engineering Front-End Design Skills with the Mobile Design Studio

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Today’s young learners face a future riddled with challenges, including access to clean water, increasing biodiversity loss, and climate change. These challenges are particularly thorny because the underlying problems are ill-structured and can be perceived in multiple ways. Front-end design projects could provide a promising context for learning to approach these wicked challenges, but historically front-end design has been difficult to implement in K-12 settings due in part to student unfamiliarity, task complexity and limited resources and support for teachers. The four-year Mobile Design Studio or MODS project seeks to support teachers in engaging secondary students in front-end design where they explore and define problems, and then generate and review design ideas that combine scientific, technical engineering, social and contextual considerations.

The project targets Earth and Environmental Science challenges for late middle school and high school students. The project team is developing a learning environment in which students can jointly learn socio-scientific reasoning and design thinking skills for approaching these wicked challenges. To facilitate this, the project will extend an existing collaborative project-based learning environment with tools specifically supporting design projects. The platform will enable students to collaboratively explore, make connections, generate, and evaluate design ideas. Critically, the platform will incorporate a virtual AI design mentor that relies on Design Heuristics, an empirically-based creativity tool, to guide students through exploration of ideas. The AI mentor will “learn” from students’ design processes to better assist them. This agent will rely both on event-based design process logs (e.g., when a student adds to a team members’ sketch or revises their problem statement) generated by the system as well as a tagging typology informed by researcher analysis for distinguishing more convergent or divergent concept generation artifacts.

In conjunction with the development plan and following a design-based research approach, the team will research students’ learning of and ability to integrate socio-scientific reasoning and design thinking, as well as changes in students’ perceptions of science and engineering and engineering self-efficacy. For students, we leverage the funds of knowledge framework in our curricular structure to help students make connections between their social and community knowledge or resources and the project. The project team will also develop a robust set of professional development (PD) workshops and aim to investigate how the PD and classroom implementation impacts teachers engineering design self-efficacy, classroom scaffolding moves, and views of front-end design.

At the time of writing, the MODS project is beginning its second year after a heavy curriculum and technology development in the first year. We are seeking to run design-based pilots in the coming months. We will be investigating both student gains from working in the environment, and the degree to which a digital drawing tools enables creative thinking and willingness to iterate. The project holds potential to bring front-end design and integrated Earth Science and engineering projects into K-12 settings and provide a more comprehensive portrayal of engineering to students who may place a greater emphasis on community impact, such as young women and minoritized students.

Authors

Dr. Corey T Schimpf http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2706-3282 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Corey Schimpf is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He is the Division Chair for the Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) for the American Society of Engineering Education 2024 annual conference. His research interests include engineering and human-centered design, advancing research methods, and technology innovations to support learning in complex domains. He has a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education.
Dr. Shanna R. Daly http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4698-2973 University of Michigan [biography]

Shanna Daly is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has a B.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University.
Ms. Leslie Bondaryk http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6853-6598 The Concord Consortium [biography]

Leslie Bondaryk received the B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the M.S. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, both in electrical engineering. She is currently the Chief Technology Officer with the Concord Consortium, Concord, MA, USA. Over her career, Ms. Bondaryk has introduced new technologies to educational research and publishing projects across computer science, mathematics, engineering, and sciences, including the first Web Calculus text, The Analytical Engine Online (PWS Publishing, 1998), and Schaum's Interactive Outline Series (McGraw Hill, 1994–2000). She was a defining force behind Mathcad software and the educational version Studyworks. She is the author of papers, articles, and book chapters on technology adoption in traditional classrooms, citizen science, and more recently on collaborative technologies in STEM software. Her research interests include data visualization, collaborative learning technologies, and novel STEM educational interfaces for formative learning and assessments.
Dr. Jutshi Agarwal University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Jutshi Agarwal is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo. She was the first doctoral student to get a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from the University of Cincinnati. She also has a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from SRM University, India. Her research areas of interest are graduate student professional development for a career in academia, preparing future faculty, and using AI tools to solve non-traditional problems in engineering education. She is currently also furthering work on the agency of engineering students through open-ended problems. She has published in several international conferences.
Dr. Carolyn Giroux http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1274-7692
Stephanie L. Harmon PIMSER, Eastern Kentucky University [biography]

Stephanie Harmon is a part-time instructor in the Department of Physics, Geosciences, and Astronomy at Eastern Kentucky University. She is also a science consultant with PIMSER (Partnership Institute for Math and Science Education Reform). Her interests include supporting preservice and inservice teachers in the implementation of the NGSS, science curriculum and assessment, classroom learning culture, concept development, and curriculum design. She has a MAEd. in Physics from Eastern Kentucky University.
Enqiao (Annie) Fan University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Jacqueline Handley Purdue University, West Lafayette [biography]

Jacqueline Handley is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Engineering Education at Purdue. Her background is in Material Science and Engineering, with an emphasis on Biomaterials Design. She is interested in, broadly, how best bridge engineering prac
Dr. A Lynn Stephens The Concord Consortium [biography]

Lynn Stephens is a research scientist with the Concord Consortium. Among her interests is investigating how students respond to innovative technologies and instructional techniques, using think-aloud interviews and video analysis. She has an EdD from the University of Massachusetts in Science and Mathematics Education Research. She also has an MA in Liberal Studies focusing on physics education research and educational technology, and a BS in Physics, both from SUNY Empire State College.

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