2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Complete Research paper focuses on an ongoing NSF funded project that is centered on assisting the successful navigation of critical transition points by historically underserved students in their educational journey in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, a Hispanic-Serving Institution. It reports on an activity related to supporting freshman and sophomore students as they transition to upper-level studies, the enhancement of an introductory general engineering course to include a collaborative learning by design project. During the first year of the NSF project (2020) a new course was added to the curriculum for freshmen students in three departments: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIEN), and Chemical and Natural Gas Engineering (CHNG). The new course, called General Engineering (GEEN 1201), replaced an existing course that was previously required for those students, UNIV 1201. While the UNIV 1201 course consisted of mainly generic student success material applicable to students of all majors, the new GEEN 1201 course added to that content to also include engineering and discipline specific content relevant to a student’s intended major field of study.
Each of the three departments (EECS, MIEN, and CHNG) designed their own version of the GEEN 1201 course to emphasize content appropriate for their majors. In addition, each department also developed a collaborative, hands-on design project to include in the course that would be appropriate and engaging for their students. The topics of the design projects implemented were a robotics design task for EECS students, a reverse engineering and 3D printing task for MIEN students, and a water filtration project for CHNG students. While the details of the implementation of those projects have been reported previously, the current paper focuses on the results of having included the design projects in each of the GEEN 1201 courses as reported by participating students in pre- and post-course surveys.
GEEN 1201 students were asked about knowledge of or experience with five general engineering topics, their interest in becoming an engineer, discipline-specific understanding, skill, ability, and interest, and about process facilitation. Overall, the learning by design project activities of the GEEN 1201 courses were reported by respondents to have had positive intellectual, psychological, and social impacts for class participants. While there was ethnic and racial diversity in the course sections, outcomes were consistent for all students, an important outcome supporting potential increases in the number of engineers from underrepresented groups.
Encouraged by the promising results observed from the 2020 and 2021 offering of the GEEN 1201 course for students in the EECS, MIEN, and CHNG departments, an additional version of the course was developed and integrated into the curriculum for students in the Civil and Architectural Engineering Department (CAEN) in 2022. Additionally, GEEN 1201 courses have since been developed for the remaining departments of the college and since the fall of 2023 are now offered to all freshmen engineering students.

References
Bailey, R. (2020) “Chaos and Control: How First-Year and Upper-Level Students Experienced Design Differently in a Project-Based Class.” Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2020.
Leung, J.K.L., Chu, S.K.W., Pong, T., Ng, D.T.K., Qiao, S. (2022) “Developing a Framework for Blended Design-Based Learning in a First-Year Multidisciplinary Design Course.” IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 65 (2).
Prince, S.P., Tarazkar, Y. (2013) “Mechanical Engineering Design Experience for Hispanic and Low Income Students.” ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings, 2013.