2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This fundamental research paper focuses on improving our understanding of how families work to solve real-world problems. While some families may have members with engineering and design backgrounds who can articulate how to solve problems, others rely on their own intuition, knowledge, and personal experiences to help steer their children toward a solution. Often, these ill-structured problems require family members to adopt specific roles throughout the process to achieve their goal. In this study, we explore the role-taking behavior of parents and children as they complete a design challenge under time constraints and with limited low-tech materials. This work investigates how family members (parents and children) shift between roles as they progress through design stages, using a chronological mapping of transcribed video and audio recordings. The results suggest that family members' changing roles fell into six emergent categories, indicating nuanced shifts within the family and shedding light on similar trends across the data set.