2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Students in a first-year engineering design course at two different universities were surveyed about their motivation (specifically, self-efficacy and utility value) for learning to use MATLAB and how it was related to their choice of major. Results do not indicate that variations in these motivational factors can be explained by students’ intended major within engineering. Follow-up interviews with students show that students demonstrate a growth mindset despite having immature conceptions of the ways they will use the computational thinking skills they are developing. This work thus presents the idea that students entering a course of study in engineering might generally believe that computational skills are important and trust that they can learn them – if they want to. If this is true, then how their thinking develops between their first semester and their last may be the most critical for developing more widespread skills in programming and automation for our students.