2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

After World War II, engineering education gradually shifted from a practice and hands-on oriented model to an engineering science paradigm emphasizing mathematical and scientific rigor. Although this transition strengthened the scientific foundation of engineering disciplines, it also distanced students from authentic “making” experience, which is essential to spark intrinsic motivation and the formation of professional identity. Abstract topics and concepts such as phase diagrams in materials science continue to be taught primarily through lecture-based pedagogy and assessed via structured problem-solving approaches, and those approaches emphasize factual knowledge and conceptual understanding, which only touch at the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. While lectures and structured problem-solving ensure conceptual accuracy, they rarely foster curiosity, reflection and metacognition, or a sense of ownership in learning, and most importantly, they frequently fail to support students form their identities as engineers.
As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into engineering education, there is a growing concern that lecture-based learning may become less effective or even less relevant when students can easily access AI for explanations and examples. This rapid emergence of AI in engineering education underscores the urgent need for new learning frameworks that are not only AI-resilient but also attuned to the learning preferences of today’s students, who are deeply immersed in social media and video-sharing platforms. Such frameworks should reimagine “making” as an integrative process that combines physical experimentation, reflective practice and digital creation to restore authenticity, motivation and engagement in engineering learning.
This paper introduces the 6M Framework (From Motivation to Making, from Multimedia to Meaning, from Metacognition to Mastery), a transferable and innovative learning framework that integrates hands-on experimentation with reflective multimedia creation to promote deeper learning and engineering identity formation. Grounded in Bloom’s taxonomy, Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, Multimedia Learning Theory (MLT) and Self-Determination Theory (SDT), the framework aligns active experimentation and reflective articulation with students’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To illustrate its application, the 6M framework was used to examine the learning process of a female student enrolled in an upper-level materials engineering course. In this course, the student independently fabricated a copper–zinc alloy and produced a series of short videos, posted on YouTube, documenting and articulating her making processes. A subsequent semi-structured interview revealed that her experiences reflected the complete cycle of the 6M framework, demonstrating its potential to enhance motivation, engagement, and metacognitive awareness in engineering learning, which led to the mastery of phase diagram through alloy and multimedia making process.