Online Session Locator

Session Description

Free ticketed event
In the past few years, industry has become increasingly demanding that our students be career-ready when entering the workforce. These skills include productive communication, the ability to be a good teammate, and taking initiative. Where might we begin to think about joining these skills to our curriculum both as integration and as a stand alone commitment? In this workshop, participants will co-create with the facilitators a set of skills and characteristics that are crucial for professional engineering success but are often overlooked by our standard curriculum. Once set, the group will build upon the facilitators’ best practices by brainstorming the places in our curriculum (and other contexts) where these skills can be developed and strengthened. Finally, the group will begin the process of workshopping specific and pragmatic moments of learning tied to the objectives of the curriculum. This environment will be a co-learning environment, in which the facilitators present their findings and create space to coalesce those findings with the extensive experience and knowledge of the participants to create a series of recommendations and best practices for infusing our curricula and engineering environments with all of the skills our students need to succeed in the workplace.

Interactive Tools: We will use the interactive online message board Padlet and QR codes to get participant feedback collected.

Introductions (5-10 minutes)
Participants and Facilitators will do an introductory exercise to get to know each other

The Challenge (25-30 minutes)
Facilitators and Participants will reflect on the set of the skills that our educational systems are often not emphasizing, why this is happening and the opportunity to improve on this. The deliverable after this time will be a set of topics that the group feels needs to be emphasized.

Exploration (45 minutes)
Participants will be grouped and start to dream and brainstorm about their courses, curricula, and contexts which have the potential for “moments of learning,” where students can start to engage with the topics in ways that are additive to the goals of the context while getting students introduced to these much needed skills

Break (10 minutes)
During the break facilitators and participants will take a bathroom break and mingle, network and connect

Begin to Enact (45 minutes)
Participants will return to their groups to start to dig into the details of where exactly these skills can be integrated within these contexts. They dive into the challenges and come with resolutions to some. Participants will be asked to come up with three goals of implementation: one that is relatively immediate, one that may take a month to implement and one that might require longer preparation but has a larger impact.

Wrap-Up and Next Steps (10 minutes)
We will come back together and combine our best practices into one document for participants to bring back for their own personal development. Facilitators will also give their final reflections and takeaways.

Speakers

1. Aris Benjamin Winger

   Material Curiosity

   Dr. Aris Winger is an associate professor of Mathematics at Georgia Gwinnett College. His work in the past years has focused on making sure those who seek careers in STEM have the best opportunities to do so. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the National Association of Mathematicians.

2. Kyle Clark

   Dr. Kyle Clark is the founder of Material Curiosity. A materials and process development engineer with 10+ years of experience, he has driven scalable manufacturing innovations across the electronics and biotech industries. He has successfully transformed lab scale operations into automated manufacturing workflows, helping transform processes from conceptual processes to full-scale industrial operations. His goal with Material Curiosity is to narrow the gap between what is taught in academics and what is expected in industry.

3. Graydon Cooper Whiteleather

   Material Curiosity

   Cooper Whiteleather is a materials engineer focused on curiosity-driven experimentation and sustainable design. His work bridges biology, engineering, and hands-on learning, from characterizing emerging fungal materials to mentoring undergraduate researchers in applied projects. He is especially interested in how thoughtful process design and collaborative, student-centered research environments can make innovative materials more accessible. Cooper is motivated by teaching, community building, and supporting the next generation of scientists and engineers.