2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Who Is Important? Pre-College Students’ Identification and Consideration of Stakeholders in a Front-End Design Project

Understanding stakeholder perspectives is fundamental to design work, yet many designers struggle to effectively identify and engage with diverse groups of stakeholders, particularly in educational settings. This study explores how middle and high school students identify and engage with stakeholders through the Program X, an NSF-funded web-based platform that integrates Earth and Environmental Science content with Design Thinking. Through an exploratory study of 24 students across three classrooms completing the first Program X module on water conservation, we analyzed student identification and engagement with stakeholders across three phases: identification, profiling, and design ideation. Content analysis revealed that students identified diverse stakeholder categories, with personal connections being the most prevalent. While stakeholder engagement was strong during the identification and profiling phases, it declined during design ideation. Results suggest that while scaffolded lessons help students consider stakeholders initially, maintaining this engagement throughout the design process remains challenging, particularly in later phases such as ideation. Teaching students about stakeholder engagement through scaffolded lessons and reflections encourages them to ideate more inclusive and stakeholder-centered design sketches. Directions for future improvement of the Program X module and plans for more intentional classroom discussions around stakeholders are discussed.

Authors

Krina Patel http://orcid.org/0009-0000-0949-9280 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Kara Brooke Stark http://orcid.org/0009-0006-9332-5630 University of Michigan [biography]

Kara Stark is a Master's of Engineering student in Systems Engineering & Design at the University of Michigan. She has a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from the same institution.
Dr. Corey T Schimpf http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2706-3282 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Corey Schimpf is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He is the Past Division Chair for the Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) for the American Society of Engineering Education. His research interests include engineering and human-centered design, advancing research methods, and technology innovations to support learning in complex domains. He has a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education.
Dr. Shanna R. Daly http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4698-2973 University of Michigan [biography]

Shanna Daly is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has a B.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University.
Dr. Jutshi Agarwal University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Jutshi Agarwal is a Doctoral candidate in Engineering Education at the University of Cincinnati. She has a Master's degree in Aerospace Engineering from University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from SRM University, India. Her research areas of interest are graduate student professional development for a career in academia, preparing future faculty, and using AI tools to solve non-traditional problems in engineering education. She has published in several international conferences.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025