2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This study is a “Complete Paper - Research” submitted to FPD.

Undergraduate engineering school is where young people enter the professional engineering communities and form their identities in engineering. During this process, they are also developing their relationships with engineering tools and forming their views on how they want to use these tools as engineers-to-be. Generative AI is one of these engineering tools as it is being increasingly used by the engineering industry. As engineering schools are re-designing their curricula to support students learning how to use generative AI, it is important to attend to the existing relationships the students have with generative AI coming out of K-12 education, and support them to develop the relationships as they become engineers.

This study is based on an introductory engineering course for first-year engineering that is hands-on and project-based. Students create and document engineering designs using a LEGO-based robotics platform. In the fall semester of 2023, students were encouraged to generative AI to support the production of their projects, and provided with tools built with generative AI to assist them in programming. The course adopted a tinkering mentality where both the instructors and the students explored the potential use of generative AI and constructed knowledge on how generative AI can be used for learning and engineering.

By analyzing 21 students’ responses to surveys before and after the course, we studied the perceptions the students hold for generative AI upon entering engineering school, and the shifts in their perceptions after attending this course. We found that students had diverse but generally negative perceptions of using generative for learning at the beginning of the course, and constructed more nuanced, positive, but critical views of how they want to use generative AI for learning and engineering after the course. This study contributes to the body of research on generative AI in engineering education and calls for educators and educational researchers to design venues that empower students to have ownership in constructing their views of generative AI as engineers-to-be.