2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering notebooks are essential in pre-college engineering education for promoting engineering discourse, encouraging student reflection, and serving as instruments for assessing student learning. This paper and presentation demonstrate an open-access digital engineering notebook option developed for pre-college engineering education contexts and share student perspectives on using this digital format of process documentation. While industries rely heavily on digital modeling and documentation, it is vital that pre-college engineering environments also provide digital notebook options for educators to give students experiences aligning with professional practice. This open-access digital notebook was designed by technology and engineering educators to help peers promote student engagement with engineering discourse, which is the way engineers communicate, think, and solve problems through language, symbols, tools, and practices used to share ideas, design solutions, and justify decisions. Building on prior research in engineering discourse and reflective documentation, the study extends these concepts into a digital, accessible format for pre-college engineering education settings.

To examine the use of this tool, researchers implemented the digital notebook in a hands-on truss material testing project with students at a large southeastern land-grant university. Technology and Engineering Education instructors asked students to document their engineering design process using the notebook and then respond to survey questions regarding their experiences. A qualitative analysis of student perspectives was conducted to identify themes related to challenges, successes, key resources, and evidence of engineering discourse in their documentation. Additionally, the paper presents deidentified examples illustrating how students applied the digital engineering notebook in practice.

This work builds on prior research in engineering discourse and reflective documentation by extending these ideas into a digital, accessible format suitable for pre-college contexts. The goal of this work is to introduce an open-access notebook template, available using Google tools, as a resource for pre-college engineering educators. Further aims include presenting student perspectives and encouraging continued discussion and development of digital engineering notebook options within pre-college engineering education research.