2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper highlights the impact that making art had on five cohorts of engineering students participating in a U.S National Science Foundation funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program during the summers of 2020 to 2024 at the University of Kansas. The program is built around a framework called the IDEA Incubator (IDEA: Integrating Discovery, Engineering and Art). Students attended weekly, hands-on workshops where they used drawing exercises and graphic design principles to develop observation, learning, and communication skills. A design expert led the incubators alongside an engineering expert who helped integrate the art and engineering concepts. At the beginning of the summer, each student received a journal to collect their observations, questions, reflections, and sketches of their chemical engineering research. Use of the journal was demonstrated and practiced at the incubators with a variety of exercises, including drawing warmups, visual analogies, visual representations of data, visual abstracts, among others. Each week students were challenged to apply these exercises and principles in the context of their individual research project and laboratory environment. Pre- and post-surveys were administered to assess perceptions, attitudes, and skills acquired during the research program and their connection with the art workshops. Students also participated in exit interviews and their responses provided important insights on the impact of the program. The data showed that the arts-based learning approach led many students to assimilate drawing as an observation and learning tool. For example, some students reported using sketches to brainstorm ideas for an experimental set up, or to troubleshoot an instrument that was not working properly during the program. Over 70% of the students reported they would continue drawing to interpret and present concepts and data with visual representation. Another notable outcome was the impact that the drawings had on the students’ communication skills. Understanding the principles that make graphic messages effective led students to apply similar concepts to enrich their oral presentations. When students attended workshops on science communication, they drew connections with design concepts that helped them understand and apply principles for more effective public speaking. This paper will illustrate how both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drawings have value in bolstering student learning. These outcomes reinforce a substantial body of research and practice that has established the value of arts-based learning, which has been shown to promote a host of skills, including innovation, leadership, teamwork, creativity, observational abilities, and communication.