This work-in-progress research paper outlines an exploratory study that investigates the agency of engineering students in the context of design-based learning experiences. Professional engineers engage in various decision-making activities when tasked with the design of a product, system, or service. Such decisions are either informed by constraints placed by stakeholders or are a consequence of trade-offs between multiple criteria in the design process. In both scenarios, engineers have to exercise agency in how they approach information seeking, goal-setting, solution generation, prototyping and testing. This requires them to be comfortable both with being given agency, and in utilizing it to their advantage for effective problem-solving. Therefore, it is important to expose students to learning environments where they have opportunities to make choices and evaluate those choices in the context of problem solving. There is also literature to suggest that opportunities for exercising agency in educational contexts improve learning, engagement, and develop skills of critical thinking and innovative problem-solving. Such opportunities are created through learning activities with different levels of scaffolding, open-endedness, and course integration - from the use of open-ended modeling projects within specific content areas, to entire design courses that invite students to exercise agency at all steps of their design process. Though agency has been studied before in these contexts, there is a dearth of studies that examine how such opportunities to practice agency impact students during their engagement with engineering design. This study aims to begin addressing this gap by exploring the research question: How do first-year students experience agency in an introductory design project? The study uses data from the first-year course sequence of an engineering program offered at large, Midwestern, public university. Students from all engineering disciplines enroll in this course and complete multiple design-related problems and projects in a team-based learning setting. This paper will present the initial results of an inductive analysis of 3 semi-structured interviews conducted with the students, capturing their own perceptions regarding their ability to make decisions throughout the project and examining the structures that encouraged or inhibited them in exercising agency. This research has implications for engineering instructors related to the design of learning environments that foster agency and the role that scaffolding plays in forming agentic student behaviors. Future work will expand our study of student perceptions of agency to include other mediating factors such as self-efficacy, motivation, and constraints on their learning experience.

This research work-in-progress paper reports on a proof of concept trial of an augmented reality learning platform that aims to unobtrusively capture elementary students' collaborative actions and affective states. With the growing push to integrate engineering education in K-12 settings, elementary teachers and students face many implementation challenges. In particular, while engineering design projects can serve as a context for developing collaborative skills, younger students might find open-ended projects where working with others who have different views than their own especially difficult. Such projects may also force young students to contend with several emotions. In this space, we propose MindLabs, an augmented reality platform for engaging in integrated science and engineering design projects. In a pilot study 216 elementary students on teams completed a lesson on forces and motions which ended with a two-day design challenge. While students interacted with the system, their collaborative actions and use of the affective state reporting tool were captured. Using learning analytics and more specifically exploratory data visualization, we present three cases that demonstrate positive and negative collaboration dynamics and affect reporting differences. We discuss how the results relate to past research on collaboration dynamics, affect and conflict and how these analytics could support teachers to identify and assist different groups of students. We conclude with future steps for this project.

This WIP paper describes the development, implementation, and preliminary lessons learned from co-creation workshops with engineering design instructors. Co-creation is a generative process to collect and integrate diverse perspectives and offers a novel approach to engineering education research. Empathy is also a relatively new concept in engineering education, but literature has shown empathy can lead to improved engineering design outcomes. The primary objective of our study is to use co-creation to develop a model that depicts how empathy manifests in engineering design. We engaged in co-creation with instructors at universities across the United States to generate a collective understanding of how empathy manifests across engineering design contexts, and we will use these findings to iterate on an extant empathy in design model. The model will inform instructional assessments and pedagogies for integrating empathy in engineering design, which will enable (1) instructors to understand the extent to which their students empathize in ways that instructors hope they will and (2) have needed strategies to respond effectively to promote empathy's use in design.

The purpose of this work-in-progress paper is to identify barriers and drivers occurring in academic institutions aiming to diversify their engineering faculty. We recognize that institutions of higher education are complex systems driven by a multitude of internal and external forces that play a role when trying to enact institutional change. Examples of these factors are limited resources, conflicting needs of multiple stakeholders, and different academic cultures. To better understand how these factors affect change, we consider engineering education as a complex system. In this early-stage project, we are using literature, existing theories, and ASEE data to identify causal loops that illustrate a particular space of institutional change related to faculty diversification in terms of gender, through the evaluation of the effect of ADVANCE initiatives. The goal is to explore the feasibility of using the complexity theory method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to identify leverage points and persistent barriers to change. We will summarize the potential of QCA as a methodology to explore the challenge of faculty diversification in STEM, and other intricate problems in higher education.

In this work-in-progress research-to-practice paper we present a newly integrated set of lenses for creating a senior capstone design course. Our future graduates face several concurrent challenges including both the increasing complexity of technology and rapid pace of innovations, and growing expectations of what engineers design will address in terms of technical and social considerations from users, stakeholders and other communities. Moreover, there are intensifying calls to address equity and inclusiveness across fields of engineering. This work proposes to begin addressing these challenges through a new pedagogical framework that synthesizes three lenses: liberative pedagogies, citizen engineering, and human-centered design and applies this synthesis to capstone design. We specifically focus this pedagogical framework on capstone design given its centrality to preparing students for engineering practice. We review literature on capstone design and summarize each lens. We then discuss our pedagogical design approach for integrating the lenses and present an integrated framework. Our results detail our learning and teaching objectives and assessments we developed from this integrated framework. Finally, we discuss critical reflections on our approach and future challenges we see before concluding.

In this study, life course theory was used to synthesize research on women's underrepresentation in computing across 4 stages of their academic trajectory: pre high-school, high-school, college recruitment, and college retention. The Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Explore databases, as well as select journals that publish on women in computing, were searched for relevant work. The synthesis reveals issues of use and access at early ages; several efforts at interventions at the pre high-school and high-school stage; the influence of stereotypical images of computing at the college recruitment stage; and exclusionary behavior and women's computing self efficacy as important issues at the retention stage. Similarities and differences across these stages are discussed, and recommendations are made for future work based on the synthesis and life course framework.