This work-in-progress (WIP) research paper reports preliminary findings from a systematic literature review on proposed threshold concepts inherent to cyber-physical systems (CPS). The study aims to help instructors develop curricula for CPS applications by identifying concepts essential for students to master in its related fields. The guiding research question was: “What existing threshold concepts from related fields (e.g., computing, computer science, systems engineering) are applicable to CPS education?” We conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) using three databases: Education Research Complete, ACM Digital Library, and ASEE PEER. Our initial query yielded 761 papers, and after filtering out duplicates and excluding those not meeting our inclusion criteria, six articles remained. We are continuing to search for threshold concepts in CPS-adjacent fields.

This work-in-progress research paper investigates how students prompt generative AI while tackling an engineering design challenge. As tools like ChatGPT become common in education, we must understand how to incorporate them into our teaching and guide students on their proper use. Although the existing literature focuses on understanding what students use generative AI tools for, less work has been done to examine students' prompting strategies when engaging with these systems. We leveraged a new brainstorming assignment in a first-year engineering course at a large Midwest public university, where students ideated collaboratively using ChatGPT for the design of their term project - a semiautonomous robot (n = 97 teams, 589 prompts). Most prompts (~50%) ranged between 55 and 95 characters, or approximately 8 to 19 words. Our initial qualitative findings suggest that their approaches center on seeking information, much like how they would use a search engine. Others directly ask the chatbot to provide alternatives for their design without providing the appropriate criteria or constraints. A subset of prompts had an evaluative component, asking ChatGPT to weigh ideas against one another. We found that 11 % of prompts included instructing ChatGPT to produce the “best” solution instead of generating multiple ideas, suggesting students focus on using the chatbot in a more convergent design process - unlike divergent thinking in brainstorming.

This work-in-progress research paper provides preliminary results from a longitudinal study using new curricular data collected to supplement the existing Multiple Institution Database for Engineering Longitudinal Development (MIDFIELD). MIDFIELD is a comprehensive dataset providing valuable information about how diverse engineering students have performed and been represented across disciplines since the 1980s. Although the descriptive power of MIDFIELD has uncovered disparities among different groups while debunking myths about others, it fails to identify the mechanisms driving specific gender and racial distributions beyond demographic characteristics. Accordingly, our focus in this study is formally characterizing the curriculum's role in perpetuating systemic barriers to degree progress for underrepresented groups. We employed the Curricular Analytics framework from Heileman et al. to quantify the complexity of plans of study across five engineering disciplines, where available, at 13 institutions over a decade since their most recent observation in MIDFIELD (n = 494). We are currently exploring our data and, in this work-in-progress, offer initial descriptive statistics as we finalize our dataset for public release. Our work is expected to benefit researchers and practitioners interested in systematically analyzing curricula. As we continue exploring our data and supplementing the dataset with new disciplines and institutions, we hope that this new lens for exploring student retention can enable us to pose and address a wide variety of new and old research questions.

This workshop introduces threshold concepts as a framework to design an integrated first-year course that covers a wide range of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from circuits to software. We discuss an interaction plan to engage participants in distilling fundamental projects for ECE courses into their fundamental components and looking for opportunities to make explicit connections across disciplines. While ECE is used as the guiding example, other disciplines can benefit from a similar approach.11This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1623067.

This full research paper uses narrative inquiry to examine the emergent `Teaching Toolbox' of a faculty member in an electrical and computer engineering department amid the backdrop of increasing class sizes. Four years ago, this ECE department received an NSF RED grant (Revolutionizing Engineering Departments) to enact large-scale curricular and culture change in the department over five years. The work under the grant has uncovered faculty-driven pedagogies that had formerly been at the periphery of the values held by the department - but did not receive much attention prior to the award. We use narrative inquiry to investigate the experiences of one electrical and computer engineering professor through a single case study. Our case study comprises multiple reflexive interviews contextualized within the history of the department through institutional documents and department meeting notes. This work is focused on the emergent pedagogical innovations one professor has enacted to [at least] maintain, [at most] improve, class engagement and participation as class sizes have increased. These pedagogical innovations reveal the multiple ways in which a professor has adapted their teaching practice to the institutional and departmental changes brought on in the past decade.

This special session introduces threshold concepts as a framework to design an integrated first-year course that covers a wide range of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from circuits to software. We discuss an interaction plan to engage participants in distilling fundamental projects for ECE courses into their fundamental components and looking for opportunities to make explicit connections across disciplines. While ECE is used as the guiding example, other disciplines can benefit from a similar approach.

This innovative practice paper introduces the use of personas as a design technique to guide the large-scale curriculum reform of an Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program at [University X], a large Mid-Atlantic research-intensive institution. The team has created five personas to explore the potential breadth of the curriculum and expand the faculty perspective on who could be a successful ECE student in the department. The concept of personas originated in the field of human-computer interaction to represent subsets of potential users as abstracted sets of characteristics. Drawing from qualitative data including observations of team meetings and document analysis, this work describes the ethnographic inquiry designers used to develop profiles not solely based on their biases. Responses to personas during implementation show that they can be used to engage the boundaries of culture, bringing to light not only characteristics of students who are not typically present in the program, but also faculty members' assumptions about characteristics needed for success.

In response to a call from the National Science Foundation, “Revolutionizing Engineering Departments” (RED), several departments across the United States are engaged with reforming their curricula, program structures, and culture. This work-in-progress paper presents a preliminary causal loop diagram (CLD) drawing from the engineering education literature. A CLD consists of variables and positive and negative relations between them describing the dynamics of a system. One RED team in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech developed a CLD to conceptually connect project goals and the challenges associated with change. The challenges were hypothesized to be linked to a perception of rigor in the department creating a “culture” that exacerbated difficulties in the change effort, which was supported by the literature. Goals of the grant including broadening participation in Electrical and Computer Engineering and adopting alternative pedagogical strategies were tied to the culture of rigor. Extending the model as a tool for the change effort is discussed.

Making curricular decisions about critical content is fundamental to the operation of any academic unit in an institution with teaching responsibilities. The literature provides a wealth of information about how instructors plan for instruction and assessment but does not detail how instructors identify core concepts. This work in progress explores curricular decision-making from the instructor's perspective within the context of large-scale programmatic change in an Electrical and Computer Engineering department. We thematically analyzed existing data from a Content Representation (CoRe) instrument used to capture instructor pedagogical content knowledge and teaching strategies for big ideas in a curriculum. The emergent themes for teaching the big ideas concerning the faculty member's perceptions of student attitudes were: instructors valuing systems thinking (but not seeing it in students) and appreciating versatility/adaptability, as well as seeing students struggling with the value of concrete vs. abstract, and having a low tolerance for ambiguity. Teaching strategies were dominantly instructor-centered. This work in progress builds upon what is known about curricular decision-making while offering insights about faculty perceptions of content knowledge and strategies for teaching it.

Virginia Tech is in the process of an intensive restructuring of its Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, driven by an NSF Revolutionizing Engineering Department (RED) grant. As a natural first step, discussion has centered on how the curriculum can be meaningfully enhanced to go beyond a mere reshuffling of core content without tangible changes in pedagogy. Accordingly, we have adopted the threshold concept framework, initially developed by Meyer and Land, as a lens to view elements of the curriculum that are often considered “troublesome” for students to learn and are both transformative and integrative in nature. We opted to frame the discussion of threshold concepts in terms of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), the knowledge associated with communicating concepts in such a way that others — primarily students — can understand. To capture PCK, we used an instrument called a “content representation” (CoRe). This paper describes one element of our sequential qualitative investigation, which had three primary stages: an individual reflection with CoRe, a series of focus groups discussing and synthesizing the CoRes, and the development of a culminating card sort workshop. The findings from the focus groups will be presented, which include the set of big ideas and the associated threshold concepts within ECE from the literature.

While there have been efforts to integrate engineering into K-12 through the planned development of standards, only recently have these plans come to fruition, albeit with seemingly little progress to appropriate integration. While the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (among others) have provided a preliminary attempt to bring engineering into K-12, the research within this paper invites a different perspective on evaluating the preparation students are receiving for the first year of engineering. The hypothesis surrounding this review suggests that there exists a mapping of topics found in a first year engineering course, the classification scheme, into the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards. Such a mapping would be multifaceted, enabling the construction of lessons tied to not only to Common Core, but also to the topics in the Classification Scheme. This paper will present the argument for the flexibility between the documents. Discussion on applications to advance K-12 Engineering Education will also be included with particular attention to the use of the Classification Scheme for First Year Engineering Courses as a foundation for the STEM pathway curriculum.

Mission trips from Ohio Northern University to the Dominican Republic during the past three years have involved running engineering workshops for teachers in secondary-level schools. These workshops included design challenges often found in a first year engineering course, discussions on learning styles, and methods of integrating an engineering mindset into the Dominican curriculum. Given the great desire on the part of the Dominican teachers to have access to continuing education, it was determined that methods of bringing content to the teachers through online modules would be investigated, as it has a great potential to make a large impact without incurring considerable expenditures. The proposed methodology involved modifying an existing assignment in a second semester introductory programming course (where a team of students develop an educational game) to create a term project which primarily incorporates internationally-focused STEM lesson plans designed by an upper-level engineering education elective course. It was found that online modules can be developed to be cost-effective, interactive, and educational for both the developers and audience. This paper will present the "first generation" of modules and student work. Possible alterations to this assignment and methods of implementing successful modules will also be discussed.

For the past 3 years, engineering students from Ohio Northern University have spent a full day running STEM activities with 4th-6th graders at a public middle school, which has been called a STEM Academy by the organizers and participants. The academy begins with a guest speaker who gives a presentation on a topic under the STEM umbrella, then students participate in multiple activities that typically involve science or engineering. While these academies had been received positively by the faculty, the effectiveness of communicating engineering to the students was uncertain. Is one day of activities truly enough to clear misconceptions of engineering? A post survey was administered where students were asked questions in a similar fashion to the "Draw an Engineer Test." The sample was composed of 6th grade students (N=60) at a small public middle school. The 6th grade students were selected in particular by the investigator in order to draw comparisons to a similar outreach previously done at another school. Responses from the survey provided a degree of insight as to how effective a STEM Academy is at informing students about engineering with its current model. Common misconceptions arose frequently in addition to common trends. The misunderstandings surprisingly manifested as the resistance of students to explore a new field by not deviating from their idealized profession. Also, students were drawn to engineering based on misinformed preconceptions. Suggestions based on this study can lead to improvements in how such an outreach is conducted to properly introduce students to STEM, particularly engineering. This paper will present the results of the first survey and provide discussion on student responses. Comparisons between other outreaches will be made to establish the nature of a STEM Academy in contrast to other K-12 programs designed to promote student interest in science and engineering. Suggestions to improve the effectiveness of STEM academies will be noted along with steps to meaningfully compare advancements in student perceptions for future efforts.

K-12 educators often incorporate projects into the science curriculum. Students conduct the activity, fill out answers on a corresponding lab sheet, strive toward results, and then move on to a new topic. With such an abrupt change in pace and lack of assessment, a question emerges: do these activities have a lasting impact on student learning or are these labs extraneous additions to the general curriculum? In an effort to integrate engineering concepts into a middle school environment, sixth graders were tasked with a design lab popularly known as “the marshmallow challenge,” which requires student teams to construct a tower from uncooked spaghetti, tape, and a single marshmallow. Approximately two months after the activity, the students who participated were asked to take a survey with four components: identification, opinion, objective, and open ended. The fifteen question survey was designed to determine if students enjoyed the activity and if students retained information from the short lecture before the activity. The results for the objective portion were averaged between classes and compared; this paper presents an analysis of those scores. Also, commonalities between written student responses are examined and discussed. These results are applicable to schools wishing to evaluate the effectiveness of brief activities similar to “the marshmallow challenge.”

“Introduction to Engineering” courses are often designed from scratch and can become a grab-bag of unrelated topics. They are often designed by instructors to cover what they feel is important. Therefore, while they may be prerequisites to second-year courses, first-year engineering programs are not necessarily integrated into the curriculum. Further, since they are often designed with little consideration for existing models, overall outcomes and content may vary widely. The results include an issue of course developers “reinventing the wheel” as successful models are not adequately disseminated. Results of multiple methods of investigation are presented. An analysis of syllabi for Introduction to Engineering courses identified course learning objectives, and these objectives were grouped to establish an initial classification scheme. A workshop in which objectives were discussed was held at a national conference and a separate draft classification scheme was proposed. A concurrent effort uses a Delphi procedure to define and categorize expected outcomes in first-year courses. Survey data from the Delphi study has been collected toward a single, final classification scheme. This paper will present results of the first two components of the study and the initial high level classification scheme identified as the Delphi analysis begins.