2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Work-In-Progress paper will describe a specific intervention to help beginning engineering students make connections between technical and sociotechnical content. Foundational engineering courses are designed to introduce new undergraduates to the discipline of engineering and help them develop the skills and knowledge to succeed throughout their studies. Students are introduced to technical content (e.g., CAD, programming, fabrication, the design process) as well as sociotechnical content (e.g., STS frameworks, engineering ethics, sustainability, professional development, teamwork, and communication). These two knowledge bases serve students best when clearly connected, yet students often struggle to establish that connection for themselves, and instructors’ attempts to emphasize their interrelated nature are not always successful. Poor connection between technical and sociotechnical content risks students perceiving sociotechnical concepts as secondary or separate from technical design. If students are not sufficiently skilled at integrating both aspects of engineering work, then they will not be prepared to navigate the complex challenges they will be asked to take on in their careers. Additionally, when equipped with a sociotechnical framework and lens through which to address engineering problems, students develop greater empathy and social responsibility.

In a first-year foundational engineering course at REDACTED, previous efforts to bridge the technical and sociotechnical produced mixed results. Team teaching between first year engineering faculty and STS faculty resulted in an artificial dichotomy between the two emphases due to students receiving the information from separate instructors. While the two instructors made efforts to cross-reference concepts taught by the other, students struggled to make substantive connections between the two disciplines that could inform their design projects. As a result, the current teaching faculty continues to explore alternative means to help students make meaningful connections between technical and sociotechnical aspects of engineering work.

To that end, this work-in-progress paper outlines the implementation of a set of sociotechnical “Challenge Essential Questions” (CEQs) in a two-semester first-year engineering course at REDACTED. These CEQs are designed to weave together the technical and social aspects of engineering design. As students learn sociotechnical frameworks to inform their design decisions and processes, they can assess multiple aspects of engineering challenges beyond just the technical and quantitative. . To do this, areas addressed by the CEQs include sustainability, sociotechnical problem scoping, universal design, engineering ethics, professionalism and teamwork, and communication. The questions task students to apply sociotechnical perspectives to the design projects they work on throughout the two semesters of the course, thus requiring them to generalize their understanding across diverse problems and settings. Students are introduced to the questions at the beginning of the Fall semester, in conjunction with relevant sociotechnical frameworks, and revisit them frequently through instructional content, class discussions, and written reflections after each design project. The CEQs are designed to be implemented across both semesters of the first-year course sequence, but this paper will primarily report on the creation of the CEQs and their implementation in the Fall semester of the 2024-25 academic year. While these questions were developed for the content of REDACTED’s first-year engineering program, a similar structure could be tailored to the needs of other institutions.