2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineers effective at creating value for society must frame that work through a lens of equity and social justice. They must identify who is affected positively and negatively by their solutions across all stages of development, manufacture, distribution, use, and disposal. In this work-in-progress paper, we examine the first stage of a four-year curriculum initiative to develop these skills in engineering students. Our four-year sequence of open-ended project courses forms the backbone of this project. Students are introduced to several tools of human-centered design in the first-year introduction to engineering sequence. They work with a local partner in a community-based learning project in the second year and complete a three-semester entrepreneurially-minded capstone experience in the last three semesters. Additionally, we have implemented several specific assignments in a Sustainable Energy Systems Design course where students must specifically address equity concerns in four project assignments.

This paper will examine the effectiveness of these assignments in eliciting the students to navigate complex questions of equity and the related tradeoffs. We assess the capacity of the students to identify design alternatives to mitigate the negative effects on marginalized populations. The paper will provide re-designed activities based on this analysis along with preliminary data on the use of a pre and post-assessment of the student's ability to transfer these skills to new projects. Students across all four years of project-based learning will be asked to
• consider a contemporary design challenge,
• identify people affected by this design from concept to repurpose/recycle/landfill,
• and discuss how these factors should affect the design of the solution.
The students will be given the same design challenge at the beginning and end of the semester, and we will examine the effect of academic progress and the specific Sustainable Energy Systems Design course assignments on the student's ability to identify and articulate appropriate concerns and solutions. The data set also includes students studying the same course as part of a one-semester project-based curriculum at a partner location.