2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

GIFTS: Activities for Exploring Beauty and Elegance in Engineering in a First-Year Seminar

Motivation
This GIFTS paper discusses an activity where students can explore the concepts of beauty and elegance and their relationship with engineering and the students' own interests. Part of the purview of many first-year engineering seminars and other introductory courses is to help students understand the field of engineering in more depth and to help students appreciate how they can connect with and be successful in engineering. Some incoming students view engineering as job-focused and transactional or have been directed into engineering fields away from career paths more traditionally associated with self-expression, to increase their future earnings or career stability. Even students with prior experience in engineering endeavors through high-school classes like Project Lead the Way or extracurriculars such as FIRST may not have explicitly considered how beauty and elegance can be cultivated or found in engineering works. While not typically considered a core first-year topic, exploring the concepts of beauty and elegance with first-year engineers broadens and enhances their understanding of engineering and provides additional avenues for their individual interests and values to mesh with the field. While not a primary motivation, this may also help to retain some students unsure about their commitment to engineering.

Objectives
The objectives of this set of activities are to enhance student appreciation and understanding of creative aspects of engineering design and other areas of engineering, and potentially help them see connections between their values and interests and various engineering careers.

Practical Implementation Details
This brief pre-class assignment and one-hour set of activities and discussions introduces students to concepts of beauty and elegance in engineering. This activity is usually run late in the semester when a rapport has been established between the students and the instructor and the students are less self-conscious about speaking about themselves in front of peers. The pre-class assignment tasks students with identifying three items, structures, products, or systems of any sort with some technical or engineering connection that they find to be beautiful or elegant, providing an image of it, and writing a few sentences about why they think that. The instructor harvests 10-20 sets of images and text from students to populate slides (anonymizing student contributions) so that the images and text can be easily shared with the entire class. The use of student materials to drive the discussions has previously been very successful at driving engagement with the materials. The instructor facilitates large-group and small-group discussions around the concepts of beauty and elegance anchored by the student-generated materials, and students write reflections after class based on prompts relating to the in-class discussion topics. Instructor materials for the pre-activity, in-class activities, and reflections will be shared at the GIFTS session with all interested parties.

Assessment Methods
Student work on the pre-activity and post-activity reflections demonstrates engagement and understanding of the topics and can be evaluated against rubrics. Past results on the pre-activity have been outstanding, representing a wide range of interesting and compelling areas, many of which the instructor would not have considered and some of which the instructor was unaware of entirely. Additionally, the end-of-semester reflections ask students to identify which topics were most impactful on them, which can be backed up by end-of-semester survey feedback on the class. Past results have indicated that this course topic was comparable in impact and student interest to other units which are often considered core to introducing engineering and it is expected that similar results will be observed this year and shared in the full paper. It is not necessary for this material to be more successful than other more widely-covered FYE course content to be potentially worth considering as part of a first-year engineering course or experience – just demonstrating comparable impact reaching some students that were not reached by other content is worthwhile.