2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering Capstone Design courses offer immersive experiential learning opportunities, allowing students to step into the shoes of engineers. However, these courses can provide even more significant benefits by viewing them as immersive communication courses as well. Current literature focuses on using improv to introduce flexibility into engineering communication, incorporating communication into the engineering curriculum as a whole, and using avatars for communication education in general. However, a synthesis of these techniques is currently lacking, namely, using avatars for teaching immersive, multifaceted engineering communication in a capstone course. Such an approach can transform students into responsive, flexible, and adaptive communicators.

To facilitate this transformation, we propose a new academic practice/design intervention by introducing audience avatars in our engineering design capstone course. Our school defines effective communication as the maximization of appropriateness and responsiveness, aligning with ABET’s student outcome three, which demands adaptability to diverse audiences. This paper outlines the implementation of four audience avatars in the context of an engineering design capstone course: these avatars support students’ communication success by enabling deeper audience analysis and understanding of diverse audiences’ competing needs, communicator preconceptions, content expectations, technical understandings, and more. Throughout the course, students must practice communicating information about their projects to project sponsors, engineering professionals, Expo judges, as well as the general public. This requirement forces students to understand a range of audiences to communicate appropriately; that these audiences revolve and rotate throughout the semester forces students to practice responsiveness.

Becoming appropriate and responsive technical communicators is incredibly challenging, and the audience avatars exist to assist students through this challenge. We created four avatars; one for each category of audience students are asked to address. The avatars do not analyze the audiences for the students, but instead are designed to make the audience more “real”; enabling students to practice audience analysis with a fleshed-out representation, instead of some phantom that they cannot grapple with. These avatars allow students to ascertain audience preferences, anxieties, etc., and practice making appropriate communication decisions. By supporting students through avatars, we can help them make better and more effective communication choices. Through multiple avatars, for singular information being communicated, we teach them to be flexible and responsive communicators.

This is a WIP paper with curricular interventions currently ongoing in Fall 2023 and planned for Spring 2024 semester. The preliminary impact of the proposed approach is planned to be evaluated using a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, which could include, pre and post-surveys, interviews with students, faculty, sponsors, and expo judges, as well as scores provided by expo judges. These results will help educators assess the benefits of the approach and develop a framework to integrate effective communication teaching and practice skills within the curriculum for engineering design courses.