2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

(WIP) Using Design Choices to Engage an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Presented at Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE) Poster Session

Engineering design involves making design choices. In an introductory circuit analysis class that has a final team design project, the student teams were given a design objective and were provided with multiple modules that could be combined to meet the given design objective. The students were told in the design proposal that they were given more modules than were necessary to complete the design project. The purpose of providing extra modules was to allow the students to make their own connections on combining the modules (with some modifications to specific circuit elements) to meet the stated design goal. In their final report, the students were asked to explain their connections of the modules by rationalizing their design choices. The final reports from the first semester this chang was implemented were used as the metric for determining the students’ engagement with an Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM). The final reports indicate that students were able to see how different sub-circuits can connect to create a more complex system level design. When analyzing the final reports, it was also discovered that by experimenting with the modules, the students were able to discover a novel solution to the design problem. This experimentation improved their understanding of system level design, and resulted in the students engaging with the “Curiosity” and “Connections” of the EM. The full paper will examine student engagement with “Curiosity” and “Connections” to EM for two semesters where the change was implemented through qualitative analysis of their written final reports and their responses to a student survey.

Authors

Eunbyul Park University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
Prof. Jonathon Kenneth Schuh http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6390-5972 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Jonathon Schuh is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois in 2018.
Prof. Olga Mironenko http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1239-185X University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr. Olga Mironenko is a Teaching Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received a specialist degree in Physics from Omsk F.M. Dostoevsky State University, Russia in 2009, and she received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Delaware in 2020. Her current interests include improvement of introductory analog signal processing and power systems courses, training for graduate teaching assistants, and mentoring of under-represented students in ECE.
Dr. Christopher D. Schmitz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9673-9832 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Christopher D. Schmitz received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois in 2002.
Yang Victoria Shao University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Yang V. Shao is a Teaching Associate Professor in electrical and computer engineering department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. She has worked with University of New Mexico before joining UIUC where she developed some graduate courses on Electromagnetics. Dr. Shao has research interests in curriculum development, assessment, student retention and student success in engineering, developing innovative ways of merging engineering fundamentals and research applications.
Chandrasekhar Radhakrishnan University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
Dr. Rebecca Marie Reck http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5894-4130 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Rebecca M. Reck is a Teaching Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research includes alternative grading, entrepreneurial mindset, instructional laboratories, and equity-focused teaching. She teaches biomedical instrumentation, signal processing, and control systems. She earned a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Arijit Banerjee University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign

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