This work in progress (WIP) research paper describes student use of representations in engineering design. While iterative design is not unique to engineering, it is one of the most common methods that engineers use to address socio-technical problems. The use of representations is common across design methodologies. Representations are used in design to serve as external manifestations of internal thought processes that make abstract concepts tangible, enhance communication by providing a common language, enable iteration by serving as a low-effort way to explore ideas, encourage more empathetic design by capturing users' perspectives, visualize the problem space, and promote divergent thinking by providing different ways to visualize ideas. While representations are a key aspect of design, the effective use of representations is a learned process which is affected by other factors in students' education. This study sought to understand how students' perceptions of the role of representations in design changed over the course of a one-semester design course. Small student teams created representations in a three-stage process-problem exploration, convergence to possible solutions, and prototype generation-that captured their evolving understanding of a socio-technical issue and response to it. The authors hypothesize that using effective representations can help develop skills in convergence in undergraduate students; one of engineering's contributions to convergent problem solving is design. More specifically, this research looked at students' use of design representations to develop convergent understanding of ill-defined socio-technical problems. The research questions focus on how students use representations to structure sociotechnical design problems and how argumentation of their chosen solution path changed over time. To answer these questions this study analyzed student artifacts in a third-year design course supported by insights on the process of representation formation obtained from student journals on the design process and a self-reflective electronic portfolio of student work. Based on their prior experiences in engineering science classes, students initially viewed design representations as time-bound (e.g. homework) problems rather than as persistent tools used to build understanding. Over time their use of representations shifted to better capture and share understanding of the larger context in which projects were embedded. The representations themselves became valued reflections on their own level of understanding of complex problems, serving as a self-reflective surface for the status of the larger design problem.

This research-to-practice paper describes an experiment designed to understand educational opportunities valued by students. Engineering education has, since the advent of ABET's EC-2000, operated using an outcomes-based paradigm predominantly focused on preparing engineers for the workforce. Engineering departments create curricula based on this paradigm that are more rigid than most other disciplines, thereby limiting the opportunities students have to explore beyond established curricular boundaries. The outcome-based paradigm limits students' agency in engineering education to pursue growth in unique, individual ways. Recognizing these challenges, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Bucknell University is adapting Amartya Sen's Capability Approach, which emphasizes student agency. In contrast to top-down approaches to curriculum design that focus narrowly on students' mastery of defined content areas, we focus on enabling students to develop the abilities needed to live a life aligned with their values. Rather than ensuring students achieve mandated outcomes, the focus is on providing opportunities, which students actively choose to transform into achievements. This study sought to better understand the opportunities that students value. The department first created a capabilities list that classified several opportunities that are of potential importance in engineering education. To gather feedback from students in the department, we offered two focus groups to discuss our capabilities list and a follow-up survey to formally elicit student valuation of capabilities. In addition, we offered an experimental course that promoted an opportunity-based engineering education model that nurtures both academic and personal growth. Student reflections from this class were analyzed using inductive coding with multiple coders, categorizing portions of students' reflections that align with our capabilities list. This study reveals the opportunities students highly regard to be better equipped to live a life they value.

Education literature has long emphasized the compounding benefits of reflective practice. Although reflection has largely been used as a tool for developing writing skills, contem-porary research has explored its contributions to other disciplines including professional occupations such as nursing, teaching and engineering. Reflective assignments encourage engineering students to think critically about the impact engineers can and should have in the global community and their future role in engineering. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at a small liberal arts college adopted ePortfolios in a first-year design course to encourage students to reframe their experiences and cultivate their identities as engineers. Our recent work demonstrated that students who create ePortfolios cultivate habits of reflective thinking that continue in subsequent courses within our program's design sequence. However, student ability to transfer reflective habits across domains has remained unclear and encouraging critical engagement beyond the focused scope of technical content within more traditional core engineering courses is often difficult. In this work, we analyze students' ability to transfer habits of reflective thinking across domains from courses within a design-focused course sequence to technical content-focused courses within a degree program. Extending reflection into core courses in a curriculum is important for several reasons. First, it stimulates metacognition which enables students to transfer content to future courses. Second, it builds students' ability to think critically about technical subject matter. And third, it contributes to the ongoing development of their identities as engineers. Particularly for students traditionally underrepresented in engineering, the ability to integrate prior experiences and interests into one's evolving engineering identity may lead to better retention and sense of belonging in the profession. In the first-year design course, electrical and computer engi-neering students (N=28) at a liberal arts university completed an ePortfolio assignment to explore the discipline. Using a combination of inductive and deductive coding techniques, mul-tiple members of our team coded student reports and checked for intercoder reliability. Previously, we found that students' reflection dramatically improved in the second-year design course [1]. Drawing upon Hatton and Smith's (1995) categorizations of reflective thinking [2], we observed that students were particu-larly proficient in Dialogic Reflection, or reflection that relates to their own histories, interests, and experiences. In this paper, we compare the quality of student reflections in the second-year design course with those in a second-year required technical course to discover if reflective capabilities have transferred into a technical domain. We discovered that students are able to transfer reflective thinking across different types of courses, including those em-phasizing technical content, after a single ePortfolio activity. Furthermore, we identified a similar pattern of improvement most notably in Dialogic Reflection. This finding indicates that students are developing sustained habits of reflective thinking. As a result, we anticipate an increase in their ability to retain core engineering concepts throughout the curriculum. Our future plans are to expand ePortfolio usage to all design courses as well as some fundamental technical courses throughout the curriculum.

Wicked problems, the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges, the United Nations' Sustainability Goals, and similar complex, global-scale endeavors fall under the broad umbrella of “convergent” work. Over the past two decades there has been an increase in interest and funding for work in this space. The NSF has two programs focused in this area, Growing Convergence Research and the Convergence Accelerator. Boston University's College of Engineering recently announced a focus on convergent projects and work. The National Academic of Engineering also has the Grand Challenge Scholars program with over 100 participating schools. The list continues to grow. The broad concept of convergence seems to be quite simple: combine the ideas, skills, and/or methods of multiple disciplines to create something new. More specific definitions vary and while the interest in convergence and convergent problems continues to increase, there is no easily operational definition of convergence. This is especially true with respect to undergraduate-level education where students have limited experience and knowledge to carry out such efforts. To better understand the variation that exists within the literature on convergence we conducted a systematic review to explore how convergence is defined in scholarly literature. We have identified a small number of categories within the definition space and conducted a thematic analysis of the aspects of each. The results show that there is a fairly consistent focus on the work being socially-relevant and on creating something new such as an idea, method, product, or process to address desired needs. Additionally, doing convergent work requires the integration of aspects of multiple disciplines and is conducted by diverse teams. Lastly, the disciplinary backgrounds of those teams almost always includes the natural and biological sciences with a subset the following disciplines: information or computing sciences, engineering, social sciences, and humanities. While there is some consistency in the definition, there also seems to be space for some variation which leaves for some level of choice in the definition.

This work in progress paper addresses one of the future challenges facing academic disciplines-traditional STEM as well as the social sciences and humanities-of how to prepare students to address complex problems that require a range of disciplinary perspectives. The goal of such preparation is termed convergence. Convergence captures both how different sets of expertise become focused in solving a problem as well as the network of connections that is built in undertaking these activities. Efforts at convergence are usually focused at practitioner, postgraduate, and graduate levels and engage multiple disciplines. Here the authors report on early-phase development of an effort to integrate convergence education into an undergraduate disciplinary-based degree program in electrical and computer engineering focused on integrating problems and projects across the curriculum. Key challenges faced were how to distinguish engineering topics from societal concerns in ways that were meaningful for students, balancing discipline-specific skills with fostering systemic understanding, and identifying relevant projects with attainable goals. Existing frameworks serve as a foundation for students to understand systemic and convergent issues. Framework development by individual students is scaffolded by expanding grading practices to provide feedback on skills believed to support convergence, developing ways to elicit student narratives about how courses and projects relate to individual interests, and adopting learning technologies that can support more emphasis on projects throughout the curriculum. Initial results on changing grading practices and introducing projects that are grounded outside of disciplinary context are presented. The relevance of this work to engineering education arises from the relatively small amount of empirical work exploring how to prepare engineering undergraduates to address convergent problems as well as the importance of such problems. The innovative potential of the work is that the effort will eventually become curriculum-wide and supported by structural changes to grading practices.