2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A leading reason that high school students do not pursue careers in engineering fields is lack of confidence with STEM concepts and scientific thinking. In addition, teachers of engineering courses often report uncertainty in communicating complex STEM topics to high school students. Even if both teachers and students feel comfortable working within a scientific paradigm, inflexible high school curricula do not provide opportunities to utilize modern digital engineering tools. All of these issues result in students who graduate unprepared for college and the workforce. However, extracurricular activities taught by experienced Career and Technical Education instructors provide students exposure to project-based, workplace-like environments that can build self-efficacy in the complex communication and organizational tasks that underlie systems engineering. Teachers of these extracurriculars often have connections to local professional networks and are allowed more control over the structure and pedagogy of their instruction. In addition, students in these programs are exposed to real-world systems thinking and technical communication challenges as they work on a project. Therefore, incorporating digital engineering tools meant to formalize and promote systems-level thinking into extracurricular STEM activities may increase student and teacher self-efficacy in STEM and workforce behaviors. Following an Agile model, these tools must be cloud-native, interdependent, and computationally supported processes in order to promote student control and continual improvement of their digital environment.

In this mixed-methods case study, researchers and systems engineering professionals partnered with the teacher of a local high school engineering extracurricular to implement Agile workplace management tools. These tools were designed to encourage self-efficacy in systems-level thinking and improve technical communication as students designed and built a solar powered racecar for a national competition. Students were surveyed for two academic years on their feelings of self-efficacy and their knowledge of how Agile workplace tools support digital engineering concepts. The survey instrument was created for this study based on workplace self-efficacy measures, and to capture changes that were made in year two of the project to reduce attrition. In addition, educators on the project and a subject-matter expert on systems thinking were interviewed for their experience designing and introducing these tools to students and professionals, as well as for confidence in teaching engineering concepts at a high-school level. Survey results indicate that implementing Agile workforce management tools improves student self-efficacy. However, benefits are most clearly seen when implementing these tools within a project management system students are already familiar with. Analysis of interview transcripts reveals this is likely due to student inability to simultaneously familiarize themselves with a new project-management system and new workforce readiness skills. In addition, educator and professional interviews reveal improved teacher confidence in communicating systems thinking and improved quality of technical communication from both teacher and students. These results highlight the need for future research on which Agile digital engineering tools most improve student and teacher self-efficacy in experiential engineering projects, as well as the importance of collaboration between basic and applied researchers and educators in developing students’ workforce readiness skills.