2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Front-end design in middle-school using a web-based collaborative platform: A design-based research approach

Presented at Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Technical Session 9

The next generation of young learners face complex challenges ranging from food security to climate change to AI adaptation in the workforce. Challenges like these may be best described as wicked problems owing to their ill structure and multiplicity of competing solutions. Equipping students with experiences and skills from front-end design can help provide new perspectives and toolsets for addressing these challenges. Front-end design deals with the highly open-ended nature of the design process such as problem framing, need finding, and ideation. Given this open-endedness, it can be particularly hard to implement in K-12 settings. This NSF-funded project seeks to support teachers in engaging secondary students in front-end design where they explore and define problems; and then generate and review design ideas that combine scientific, technical engineering, social and contextual considerations. The project takes a design-based research approach in developing curriculum and a web-based platform. The platform enables collaborative content generation, sharing, sketching tools, and scaffolding for idea generation. We present preliminary results of about 30 middle and high school students from the first series of pilots in 3 different classroom contexts (two formal and one informal summer camp). Students were asked to explore and develop solutions to water shortages in their community through a series of 8 activities spanning front-end design processes. We collected post-surveys, interviews, and artifacts from the students, and interviews from the teachers. In this study, we analyze these data streams using quantitative and qualitative approaches to help us understand students' perceptions of engineering, the impact of the project on students’ learning, and students' knowledge integration. Teacher interviews also helped guide future iterations of this project. Preliminary findings include an overall positive response by both teachers and students, particularly with respect to aligning the content with issues in the community. Teachers expressed mixed opinions about the technology of the project while student data suggests lack of clarity in what constitutes engineering work. We synthesize these findings to guide our revisions of the learning conjectures and curriculum materials design to illustrate how we use design-based research in this project. We draw out implications for revising the materials, supporting knowledge integration across different areas, and more broadly supporting front-end design in distinct K-12 contexts.

Authors

Dr. Jutshi Agarwal University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Dr. Jutshi Agarwal is a Research Scientist at the Department of Engineering Education, University at Buffalo. She received her doctoral degree in Engineering and Computing Education from the University of Cincinnati. She also has a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering. Her primary research areas of interest is in preparing future engineering faculty or teaching professional development of engineering graduate students. She also works in the areas of teaming in engineering classrooms and creating instructional tools for engineering in various contexts and educational settings. She has expertise in mixed-methods research designs.
Mr. Siddharthsinh B Jadeja University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Siddharthsinh Jadeja is a passionate and driven engineering education graduate research student in the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo, deeply committed to enhancing engineering education through innovative, human-centric design approaches. With a strong foundation in engineering principles and a keen interest in educational methodologies, Siddharthsinh focuses on integrating design thinking into curricula to foster creativity, problem-solving skills.
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. Carolyn S Giroux http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1274-7692 Wentworth Institute of Technology [biography]

Carolyn Giroux is an instructional designer at Wentworth Institute of Technology with a background in educational research, curriculum design, and learning assessment. She has a MA in Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University and a PhD in Educational Studies from the University of Michigan.
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.
A Lynn Stephens [biography]

Lynn Stephens is a research scientist with the Concord Consortium. Among her interests is investigating how students respond to innovative technologies and instructional techniques, using think-aloud interviews and video analysis. She has an EdD from the University of Massachusetts in Science and Mathematics Education Research.

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

« View session