This work-in-progress research-to-practice paper presents an intervention on integrating computational thinking modules into a software engineering course. The national consensus on the significance of computational thinking has prompted the expansion of related educational initiatives over the past decade. Since the definition of computational thinking by Wing in 2006, this concept has gained significant attention within the educational community. Particularly this surge of interest has led to extensive research into its conceptual foundations and subsequent integration into educational curricula since 2013. National initiatives have since emerged to incorporate computational thinking into the educational system. Furthermore, as artificial intelligence and computing systems become increasingly integrated into daily life, there is a growing demand from industries for a workforce and graduates adept at critical thinking and problem-solving. Aligned with this national movement, our study presents a two-year institutional initiative, aimed at integrating computational thinking into the software engineering program. The software engineering discipline extensively involves design thinking and problem-solving skills. However, we noticed that these higher-level skills are not imparted early in the program to teach students this method of thinking and approaching problems. To bridge this skill gap, we developed a set of computational thinking modules and integrated them into a gateway course in the software engineering program. Over two years, we implemented this intervention in an introductory-level course and evaluated its impact on students' computational thinking skills by analyzing their responses to a standard Computational Thinking Assessment survey. The results showed significant improvement in most components. These early findings underscore the effectiveness of integrating these computational thinking modules into the gateway courses, regardless of the specific course topic. A notable feature of these modules is their adaptability to diverse engineering courses, suggesting broader applicability across disciplines. Moving forward, our research aims to expand the integration of the computational thinking modules into various courses in other institutes across the nation and analyze their impact on student performance.

Undergraduate (UG) Undergraduate (UG) research is a high-impact practice that has been shown to benefit students' development and has the potential to contribute to faculty research output. However, UG research does not attain the impact that it could have on student development or faculty research productivity. Faculty doing UG research face two main challenges: continuity and efficiency. Continuity is important for faculty to achieve research goals. However, onboarding, training, and mentoring UG researchers can be an inefficient, time-consuming process due to a lack of formal mentorship processes. From a student perspective, UG research has two main challenges: lack of autonomy and understanding of relevance relative to other co-curricular activities. In some research groups, UG students may not feel that they have ownership of their work, which results in the decay of intrinsic motivation. We are developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM)-focused framework to enhance the research experience both for faculty and students. This framework provides faculty with access to resources and collaborators to support their efforts in engaging students in UG research and developing continuity in their laboratories. Students, on the other hand, will benefit from training opportunities designed to spark their curiosity, help them establish connections between their learnings, and enhance the value they create through their work. EM principles can transform UG research experiences by improving students' understanding of the relevance of their research and how it creates value for society. Our goal is to infuse EM into students' understanding of the UG research process, with the objective of broadening their participation, addressing institutional challenges, and enhancing research productivity to benefit society. We seek to understand what benefits students perceive they will gain through the UG research experience so that we can understand how entrepreneurially-minded learning (EML) connects to those motivations. To answer this question, we survey students immediately after their UR experience, utilizing questions from well-developed UG research outcome surveys, such as the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA), coupled with questions focused on EML. Baseline survey data indicates that students could benefit from workshops that help them identify stakeholders and set goals in research, both of which align well with the goals of EML. First and second-year students involved in a pilot survey endorsed perceived gains in their understanding of research and desire to participate in research after exposure to the ideas of EML in research. This paper also describes the modules we created that utilize the EM to reduce inefficiencies in training, mentoring, and recruiting UG researchers. These can be shared across large and small universities and with scaling organizations such as the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) consortium and the Council on Undergraduate Research. The workshops would be broadly available for faculty to implement in courses, seminars, or research programs.

It is essential to educate a generation of the engineering workforce that considers human values such as human welfare, freedom from bias, universal usability, and equity in all the stages of engineering product development. These values should be included alongside conventional technical requirements (e.g., performance effectiveness, reliability and resilience, compliance with technical standards and protocols). One approach to address the need for incorporation of human values in the design is to provide students with frequent learning opportunities to practice adopting an inclusive mindset in their interpersonal interactions as well as in their engineering analytical problem-solving and design practices. We designed an intervention to foster student awareness of non-inclusive designs in engineering and medicine, their own tendencies towards these biases, and the impacts of these biases on neglected demographics. An important component of this intervention was embedding it into the teaching of analytical content: we implemented it in a middle-year analytical course with a heavy focus on model-based learning and mathematical modeling, as opposed to a separate unit or course on inclusion or ethics, or a senior design course. Although we created this intervention in a biomedical engineering course, it could be used in any science and engineering class. In this paper we focus on the intervention’s rationale, its implementation process, and how our approach was guided by the concepts of entrepreneurial mindset and value sensitive design. We report what medical fields were included in students’ brainstorming of flawed designs. We also investigate whether the identity of students (gender, ethnicity) has any relation with the affected stakeholders in the flawed designs in brainstorming examples of biased designs, developing a personal experience story, and a team exercise in developing a case study and proposed solution. Also, we summarize an investigation of whether exposure to classmates’ direct experiences of non-inclusive designs (in contrast to hypothetical experiences) affected their choice of a stakeholder in their project’s topic. Finally, we explore whether students focused on a case study topic which created value for themselves or whether they focused on a topic which benefitted others (and thus, whether empathy resulted from this intervention in inclusive design).