Board 148: Ongoing Evaluation of Pre-College Students’ Learning Outcomes During a Human-Centered Engineering Design Summer Camp

Justin Kota Shell; Vatsal Tapiawala; Taylor Tucker Parks; Saadeddine Shehab

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE) Poster Session
Tagged Division: Pre-College Engineering Education Division (PCEE)
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/46707

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Paper Authors

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Justin Kota Shell University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Justin Shell holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and is working on his M.S. in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His graduate research focuses on diagnostics of electric propulsion thrusters. Also, he is a Siebel Center for Design research scholar focusing on integration of human-centered design principles in engineering curriculum.

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Vatsal Tapiawala University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Taylor Tucker Parks University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Taylor Parks is a research fellow in engineering education at the Siebel Center for Design. She earned her bachelor's in engineering mechanics and master's in curriculum & instruction from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on promoting teamwork in complex engineering problem solving through collaborative task design. She currently co-leads the integration of human-centered design principles within select courses across the Grainger College of Engineering.

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Saadeddine Shehab University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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I am currently the Associate Director of Assessment and Research team at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I work with a group of wonderful and talented people at SCD’s Assessment and Research Laboratory to conduct research that informs and evaluates our practice of teaching and learning human-centered design in formal and informal learning environments.

My Research focuses on studying students’ collaborative problem solving processes and the role of the teacher in facilitating these processes in STEM classrooms.

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Abstract

Engineering summer camps, which allow pre-college-aged students to participate in authentic design tasks, provide opportunity to experience topics or activities that may not be offered at school. Campers have opportunities to preview college-level engineering education, explore potential college interests, and develop authentic collaboration skills. In our ongoing study, we implemented a week-long collaborative engineering design camp that allowed students to experience a human-centered design approach to a design task. Human-centered design (HCD) is a unique problem solving approach that can lead to meaningful and innovative solutions. Campers worked in teams of 3–4 on a task that required them to reverse engineer a product through dissection and then implement changes to its design to tailor the product to meet a user-defined need. Two groups of high school students participated in two week-long sessions. The first group had 14 students (8 male, 6 female) and the second group had 17 students (10 male, 6 female, 1 non-binary). In this paper, we used 5-point Likert scale pre- and post-test surveys to examine the impact of the camp on three constructs: attitudes toward HCD, awareness of the role of HCD in engineering, and group work skills. Our findings indicated that campers’ attitudes toward HCD and their awareness of the role of HCD in engineering improved significantly. No significant differences were found in the improvement of their group work skills. Our previous work discussed the learning outcomes associated with an earlier iteration of the camp’s design using surveys and ethnographic observations. Further analysis of this iteration’s video and audio data are needed to understand the reasons behind the lack of significant improvement in group work skills. This work is beneficial to educators who are interested in human-centered engineering design tasks at the pre-college level. Future iterations should investigate the nature of students' collaboration and learning outcomes using other forms of empirical evidence such as interviews and video and audio data.

Citation
Format

Shell, J. K., & Tapiawala, V., & Parks, T. T., & Shehab, S. (2024, June), Board 148: Ongoing Evaluation of Pre-College Students’ Learning Outcomes During a Human-Centered Engineering Design Summer Camp Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/46707

TY - CPAPER
AB - Engineering summer camps, which allow pre-college-aged students to participate in authentic design tasks, provide opportunity to experience topics or activities that may not be offered at school. Campers have opportunities to preview college-level engineering education, explore potential college interests, and develop authentic collaboration skills. In our ongoing study, we implemented a week-long collaborative engineering design camp that allowed students to experience a human-centered design approach to a design task. Human-centered design (HCD) is a unique problem solving approach that can lead to meaningful and innovative solutions. Campers worked in teams of 3–4 on a task that required them to reverse engineer a product through dissection and then implement changes to its design to tailor the product to meet a user-defined need.
Two groups of high school students participated in two week-long sessions. The first group had 14 students (8 male, 6 female) and the second group had 17 students (10 male, 6 female, 1 non-binary). In this paper, we used 5-point Likert scale pre- and post-test surveys to examine the impact of the camp on three constructs: attitudes toward HCD, awareness of the role of HCD in engineering, and group work skills. Our findings indicated that campers’ attitudes toward HCD and their awareness of the role of HCD in engineering improved significantly. No significant differences were found in the improvement of their group work skills. Our previous work discussed the learning outcomes associated with an earlier iteration of the camp’s design using surveys and ethnographic observations. Further analysis of this iteration’s video and audio data are needed to understand the reasons behind the lack of significant improvement in group work skills. This work is beneficial to educators who are interested in human-centered engineering design tasks at the pre-college level. Future iterations should investigate the nature of students&#39; collaboration and learning outcomes using other forms of empirical evidence such as interviews and video and audio data.

AU - Justin Kota Shell
AU - Vatsal Tapiawala
AU - Taylor Tucker Parks
AU - Saadeddine Shehab
CY - Portland, Oregon
DA - 2024/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Board 148: Ongoing Evaluation of Pre-College Students’ Learning Outcomes During a Human-Centered Engineering Design Summer Camp
UR - https://peer.asee.org/46707
ER -