2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This evidence-based research paper discusses an innovative approach to help students compare and contrast the contributions of different types of engineers in the development of a product, process, or system, which is a typical outcome of first-year engineering programs. In such programs, students often engage with different engineering disciplines at a very cursory level, relying heavily on presupposition as to the duties and responsibilities of different engineering majors.

In our institution, traditional activities designed to achieve this outcome usually rely on a product archeology approach where students disassemble a physical product and are tasked with identifying engineering disciplines that would be needed to design or fabricate the product. While this type of activity provides a means of enhancing student motivation through a hands-on group activity, students often identify only common disciplines such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and materials science engineering—largely due to the nature of most commercially available products.

We designed an intervention motivated by the intention of providing students with an experience that is more inclusive of multiple engineering disciplines and that can leverage student motivation towards the potential for larger impact and social change inherent in more real-world engineering challenges. We designed a series of scenarios that represent real-world challenges. The scenarios were designed such that the problem featured aspects of multiple engineering disciplines, including some of the disciplines that are less widely known (e.g. Biological Systems Engineering, Ocean Engineering, etc.). Student teams were then tasked as consultants to the scenario and were required to expand on the context of the problem, develop a stakeholder map, create 3-4 job postings, and suggest different engineering majors that could potentially serve in these imagined job positions.

Our intervention is grounded in Scenario-Based Learning. A key shortcoming of our first-year program is that students often enter with preconceived notions about the broader roles of engineers in society, as well as the specific tasks, knowledge, and responsibilities of various engineering disciplines. Therefore, our goal was to increase student engagement in exploring engineering roles through meaningful scenarios, helping them begin to challenge and reconsider their own preconceptions.

Additionally, from a motivation perspective, the scenarios were intentionally broad, allowing student autonomy in determining which aspects of the problem space they wished to explore. This open-ended approach was meant to provide students with agency in their learning, further increasing intrinsic motivation.

The assessment draws from student reports and presentation slide sets on their Exploring Engineering scenarios assignment. We collected data from three sections of a first-year foundational course, with roughly 72 students each (12 teams of six students per section), taught by the same instructor. We used content analysis to explore these artifacts in search of advantages or disadvantages as compared to our prior experience with traditional assignments. For instance, advantages include the number of majors and disciplines linked to a particular scenario and the meaningfulness and depth of the connections made by students. Subsequent thematic analysis allowed us to categorize the most salient themes found.

We observed that students were able to make meaningful connections to engineering disciplines that were previously overlooked. Additionally, they engaged in a more nuanced exploration of the duties, responsibilities, and day-to-day activities within various engineering disciplines. This deeper exploration allowed them to connect multiple disciplines to different facets of a given opportunity or problem. These results contrast with those of the traditional approach, where students often fail to go beyond descriptions of what different engineering disciplines and majors cover from a thematic perspective.