2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A Summer Bridge Program Tech Challenge for Improving Self-Efficacy of Diverse Incoming Engineering First-Year and Transfer Students

This Complete Evidence-Based Practice Paper evaluates a summer bridge program for academically talented, diverse, and low-income engineering first-year and transfer students entering the University of California, Irvine. Summer bridge programs can play an important role in a student’s transition to a 4-year university. These programs may give students opportunities to build community, connect with institutional resources, practice their knowledge and skills in critical areas, and generally excite and engage them in the next step in their education. Students in the program worked in teams to complete a “Tech Challenge” consisting of an interdisciplinary team project to design and build a remotely-controlled robotic vehicle to complete a competition course. This tech challenge was meant to build team-working relationships and hands-on engineering skills to give these students confidence entering their engineering studies at the 4-year university. Students completed surveys at the beginning and the end of the program in which they evaluated the program, their own knowledge and skills, and psychological safety in their team project. We present implementation details of the tech challenge and results from analyzing these surveys, comparing responses from the pre- and post-surveys as well as differences between the first-year and transfer students. Students reported feeling more confident and prepared for engineering studies in general, and more proficient at teamwork and important hands-on engineering skills specifically, after participating in the program.

Authors

Dr. David A. Copp http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5206-5223 University of California, Irvine [biography]

David A. Copp received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Prior to joining UCI, he was a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico. His broad research interests include engineering education, as well as control and optimization of nonlinear and hybrid systems with applications to power and energy systems, multi-agent systems, robotics, and biomedicine. He is the recipient of several awards for his innovative teaching and excellence in research mentorship.
Anna-Lena Dicke http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-8816-455X University of California, Irvine [biography]

Dr. Dicke is an Associate Project Scientist within the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. In her research, she aims to understand how students’ motivation and interest in the STEM fields can be fostered to secure their educational persistence and long-term career success. Trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice, she is currently involved in an NSF-funded project aimed at fostering the persistence and retention of low-income engineering transfer students.
Dayana Rivas University of California, Irvine
Analia E. Rao University of California, Irvine

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

For those interested in:

engineering
Faculty
transfer
undergraduate