2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

GIFTS: Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience in a First-Year Design Course

Presented at FPD: GIFTS Papers - Approaches to Holistic Student Development and Support

This Great Ideas for Teaching Students (GIFTS) paper presents a guided project to engage first-year engineering students in research through a “Course-based Undergraduate Research experience. Undergraduate research enables students to apply classroom concepts to research concepts in the real world. First-year students can benefit from a structured introduction to research practices and contribute to research projects in the future [1]. This GIFTS paper describes a short-term service-learning project with a research-based lesson plan where students develop proficiency in Excel, follow experimental protocols to collect data, and then apply data analysis skills to answer a real-life research study question (all within a classroom setting). 400 first-year students across multiple engineering disciplines, at the University of Connecticut, engaged in a service-learning project to build and test a cost-effective do-it-yourself (DIY) air purifier (also called a Corsi-Rosenthal (C-R) Box). The C-R Box reduces respiratory aerosols and improves indoor air quality. Prior to the project, students completed an in-class Excel workshop to practice processing and plotting data using a sample data set. Students then worked in teams of four in the First-Year Design Laboratory for two weeks to build and test these air purifiers [2,3]. After building the C-R boxes, students performed a two-hour test to evaluate the efficiency of their air purifiers in reducing indoor particulate matter levels following a detailed experimental protocol. Using the knowledge gained in the Excel workshop, students analyzed and plotted the collected data as part of the assessment. The combined data collected by the student teams are included in a publication currently under preparation. This "research-integrated" project exposed first-year students to real-life research early in the undergraduate curriculum and demonstrated how scientific inquiry can be integrated into a first-year engineering course through a simple project.

Authors

Dr. Fayekah Assanah University of Connecticut [biography]

Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Connecticut, 260 Glenbrook Road, Unit 3247, Storrs, CT 06269-3247.

Dr. Assanah is the team lead for ENGR 1166: Foundations of Engineering, a core course for all first-year engineering students at the University of Connecticut consisting of over 400 students. She has developed and implemented project-based lessons to build Corsi-Rosenthal boxes for all first-year engineering students through this initiative.
Marina Creed [biography]

Marina Creed is an Instructor in the Department of Neurology at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and practicing Neuroimmunology Nurse Practitioner in the Multiple Sclerosis Center at UConn Health. She has been engaged in translational public health efforts throughout the COVID19 pandemic to improve outcomes for her immunosuppressed patients by reducing exposure to infectious and non-infectious air pollution in public schools and community spaces throughout the State of Connecticut. She founded and is the director of the UConn Indoor Air Quality Initiative, a cross-campus, multidisciplinary team of scientists and clinicians studying low-cost air purifiers in both laboratory and real-world settings.
Misti Levy Zamora University of Connecticut, Farmington
Dr. Kristina Wagstrom http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2162-1036 University of Connecticut [biography]

Dr. Kristina Wagstrom is an Associate Professor in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. She specializes in applying chemical engineering principles to investigations of the impacts of air pollution on human and ecosystem health. She also spends time implementing novel, research-based pedagogy into chemical engineering undergraduate education and working extensively with undergraduate researchers from across disciplines.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

« View session

For those interested in:

engineering
undergraduate
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
engineering technology