2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering summer camps, which allow pre-college-aged students to participate in authentic design tasks, provide opportunity to experience topics or activities that may not be offered at school. Campers have opportunities to preview college-level engineering education, explore potential college interests, and develop authentic collaboration skills. In our ongoing study, we implemented a week-long collaborative engineering design camp that allowed students to experience a human-centered design approach to a design task. Human-centered design (HCD) is a unique problem solving approach that can lead to meaningful and innovative solutions. Campers worked in teams of 3–4 on a task that required them to reverse engineer a product through dissection and then implement changes to its design to tailor the product to meet a user-defined need.
Two groups of high school students participated in two week-long sessions. The first group had 14 students (8 male, 6 female) and the second group had 17 students (10 male, 6 female, 1 non-binary). In this paper, we used 5-point Likert scale pre- and post-test surveys to examine the impact of the camp on three constructs: attitudes toward HCD, awareness of the role of HCD in engineering, and group work skills. Our findings indicated that campers’ attitudes toward HCD and their awareness of the role of HCD in engineering improved significantly. No significant differences were found in the improvement of their group work skills. Our previous work discussed the learning outcomes associated with an earlier iteration of the camp’s design using surveys and ethnographic observations. Further analysis of this iteration’s video and audio data are needed to understand the reasons behind the lack of significant improvement in group work skills. This work is beneficial to educators who are interested in human-centered engineering design tasks at the pre-college level. Future iterations should investigate the nature of students' collaboration and learning outcomes using other forms of empirical evidence such as interviews and video and audio data.