2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering is much more than merely calculating or modelling various technological outcomes. Engineers have a professional culture that is traditionally learned at work and not primarily during engineering education. Organized attempts to include such cultural components in engineering education have been made, for example, through the CDIO (conceive, design, implement, operate) initiative in higher education, although they are mostly lacking in secondary education. Thus, the objective of the proposed study is to investigate the affordances for authenticity of role-play based project work in a Swedish upper secondary software engineering program. The students partake in a development project role-play, where they take on previously decided roles (project manager, responsible for legal and integrity issues, art director). The teacher acts as both customer and manager. The students are intended to act (behave) like engineers in their activities and communication within and outside of the project group. Data were collected through observations and interviews with teachers and students.

Preliminary findings indicate that students take the project more seriously when they engage in role-play, and they express that they received experiences that better prepare them for the future. For instance, the students are more formal and to the point when acting as consultants and updating their “boss” on the progression of their web designs. The assigned roles helped the students to structure their work. The clear division of responsibilities lowered the level of conflict in some groups. For example, the art director had the final say when it came to design decisions. However, some students also felt that the project was not deemed real enough just because it was a role-play. For example, the teacher was boss, customer, and educator in different phases of the project. Nevertheless, students mostly expressed engagement by the fact that the project was student-centered and was something different than regular schoolwork. Albeit so, some students expressed during the interviews that they did not know whether the project was realistic or not, but trusted the teacher’s professional experience.

Implications of the study are that it demonstrates that while role-playing is not necessarily equivalent to authentic, it is fulfills a situated learning process. Such learning maysimulate real-world scenarios, bridge theory and practice, and facilitate transfer to a real-world context, provided there is mutual confidence and responsibility between students and teacher.