2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Open-ended projects in engineering classrooms provide unique opportunities to develop skills and ways of thinking that prepare students for professional practice. An Open-Ended Modeling Project (OEMP) is a specific project type within engineering courses that has a loosely defined goal or problem with the intent to promote student agency in both solution finding and problem statement definition. In this work, we have sought to understand how students make deliberate decisions while developing an engineering model. Though students exhibit agency, they also experience restrictions from these projects, so there exists a need to analyze such restrictions. This analysis may shed light not only on student outcomes but also on instructor involvement.

At present, seven interviews from students involved in OEMPs have been analyzed through inductive coding, starting with the three codes from a prior study that focused on student agency: restrictions due to outside limitations, how the project is structured, and accountability standards. These interviews were conducted in the immediate post-COVID era, at a private southern university, and range from one to two hours. The students were in either Statics or Dynamics courses, and those in Dynamics courses had previous OEMP experience through the Statics course. Students submitted a completed design of a product or system, along with the necessary assumptions made. These projects were weeks long, with either a culminating report or group presentation. In the interviews, students were asked to recall how they solved the OEMP and were prompted to provide more details if their description was sparse. Students were then asked to evaluate their model, provide their thoughts on the OEMP problem, and answer some demographic questions
Preliminary results show a large expansion of the initial codes as subsets of the original three, with some as potentially interconnected. New additions to outside limitations include course scope and prior OEMP experience. Additions to restrictions due to the OEMP structure include instructor “bumper guarding” of mistakes and the advantages of group work. Accountability extensions involve an entire model that describes different levels of student accountability, including the ability to explain model robustness, as well as accountability to learning and the engineering profession. The analysis also revealed a view of student decisions as self-imposed restrictions, leading to the conclusion that both positive and negative restrictions are present

The additions of these codes have implications for instructors, suggesting that they may benefit from more awareness of their role in activity structure by setting checkpoints to guide students through the openendedness challenge. Additionally, results indicate criteria to assess the level of student accountability to the engineering profession. For example, the ability for a student to explain simplifications and the effect on the overall model may indicate a fuller accountability score. The structure of the OEMP may be affected by class scope, grade weighting, and the time commitment required from students. Furthermore, elements of OEMP structure may be upheld as beneficial from this analysis, such as individual work before group involvement. Overall, instructors using OEMPs may use this analysis to improve their student outcomes.