Engineering

This study explores undergraduate engineering and education students’ perspectives on their interdisciplinary teams throughout the rapid transition to online learning and instruction from a face-to-face to a virtual format.

Ed+gineering, an NSF-funded program, adapted hands-on robotics instruction for online delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This qualitative multiple case study shares the experiences of participating education students in spring 2021 as they collaborated virtually with engineering students and fifth graders to engineer bioinspired robots in an afterschool technology club adapted to be virtual.

We are developing case studies of specific types of teacher-supported conversation in which students are asked to consider design decision-making not just as a technical task, but as a complex socio-technical activity with ethical, economic, and political dimensions. Our work foregrounds a perspective of care in students’ engineering discourse and builds on emerging frameworks exploring compassionate design, macroethics and ideology, and critical socio-technical literacy. In this paper and its related poster, we summarize our first year of design talk enactments and analysis.

We are developing case studies of specific types of teacher-supported conversation in which students are asked to consider design decision-making not just as a technical task, but as a complex socio-technical activity with ethical, economic, and political dimensions. Our work foregrounds a perspective of care in students’ engineering discourse and builds on emerging frameworks exploring compassionate design, macroethics and ideology, and critical socio-technical literacy. In this paper and its related poster, we summarize our first year of design talk enactments and analysis.

To build a sustainable future, science and engineering education programmes should emphasise scientific investigation, collaboration across traditional science topics and disciplines, and engineering design, including design and evaluation of solutions. We adopted a qualitative case study design to address the research question, What is the process of team co-construction of instructional materials that emphasize learning through both science investigation and engineering design? The paper outlines the first year of our team co-construction activities involving the design, implementation, and evaluation of instructional materials for secondary science.