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.

This research-to-practice full paper presents and approach to bringing convergence to the undergraduate engineering context. Convergence is the process of integrating a variety of ideas, skills, and methods to create new ideas, skills, and methods in order to address complex, socially relevant challenges like the UN Sustainable Development Goals [1] and the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Grand Challenges [2]. In the US, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been a major driver of convergence related research and has focused on work primarily at the graduate level and beyond. To explore how convergence concepts translate to an undergraduate engineering context this research to practice paper describes a taxonomy that translates convergent knowledge, skills, and mindsets into the domain of undergraduate engineering education. While we do not believe it is reasonable to expect undergraduates to engage with convergence in the same way as graduate students or postdoctoral scholars, we believe that they can develop in areas that will allow them to engage in convergent work later in their careers. This paper first defines convergence and then examines the challenges and opportunities related to developing a student's ability to do convergent work in an undergraduate context. The developed taxonomy outlines the knowledge, skills, mindsets, and structures that support convergent work from the larger research literature, and adapts these to an undergraduate context. The taxonomy is then used to conduct a gap analysis of an undergraduate electrical and computer engineering degree program. This analysis is based on the syllabi. This work was conducted in the context of an electrical and computer engineering department situated in a medium-sized primarily undergraduate liberal arts institution in the mid-Atlantic region. As the challenges and opportunities are similar to but also unique to this institution this work forms a rich case study that can inform similar efforts in other institutions and contexts where a similar gap analysis may be beneficial. The goal of this work is to enable others to analyze an their existing student experience to see what aspects of convergence are currently included.

In this paper, we discuss the results and key findings of a daylong “Making and Makerspaces in Electrical and Computer Engineering” (ECE) workshop hosted in conjunction with the ECE Department Heads Association Annual Conference in 2022. This workshop brought together thought leaders in making and makerspaces from across ECE, engineering education, and the broader maker community to discuss the current state of (change)making in ECE, making with purpose, and anti-racist engineering spaces in addition to live maker activities at lunch and an unconference to discuss community, partnerships, and ECE in mechanical engineering makerspaces. Broadly, a key finding from the conference was the need to shift the conversation from talking about making spaces (which tend to focus more on the equipment and facilities management) to ecosystems of making change, including culture, identity, community partnerships, shifting from labs to makerspaces, and shifting from spaces to makerspaces. Another key finding was an ecosystem view of possible touchpoints for making in an engineering program, including making in pre-college, making for recruitment, making in undergraduate design classes, making in extracurricular settings, making for fun, and making at home --all leading toward growing a thriving, diverse engineering workforce of the future. The themes that emerged from the workshop discussions were summarized and presented to department heads about how makerspaces connect to broader efforts in the ECE community such as how to become more equitable and inclusive, how to rebrand programs to attract new students, and promote best practices in educating 21st century learners.

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.

This innovative practice, work-in-progress paper reports on a student-led project to develop an educational game to build conceptual understanding in electric circuits. Circuits is a common engineering course, foundational to electrical engineering, but taken by many students in other disciplines due to the content being part of the Fundamentals of Engineering examination. Given the fact that most electrical phenomena are not experienced directly or causally in everyday life and that the phenomena arise from interactions between charges, the concepts that underlie circuit behavior are emergent rather than direct. Misperceptions of emergent concepts are robust due to students day-to-day experiences with more direct concepts. To develop correct conceptual understandings it has been hypothesized that it is necessary to let students explore misconceptions in a causal, i.e. cause and effect, way. To enable students to explore phenomena of electric circuits in a causal way this work-in-progress paper outlines development of a puzzle-format game platform which enables a wide variety of conceptual problems to be posed and player solutions recorded. Briefly the game builds in visual elements on the Unity development platform to represent both potential and current. Game developers pose puzzles, similar to problems on existing circuits concept inventories, that players solve by wiring a level-defined set of electronic components. A novel feature of the game platform is the use of a SPICE®engine to allow in-game computation of many circuit configurations. The work-in-progress paper discusses development of the game platform, design for conceptual understanding, and initial trials using the game to teach circuit concepts.

Entrepreneurially Minded Learning is a pedagogical technique that seeks to equip students to be more curious about trends in the changing world, make connections from disparate sources of information to gain insight, and identify unexpected opportunities to create extraordinary value for themselves and their communities. The core of the entrepreneurial mindset can be summarized succinctly by the three Cs: Curiosity, Connections, and Creating value. This interactive workshop will introduce participants to these three Cs using three specific tools that facilitators have successfully used in their engineering classrooms. The workshop is targeted towards a total of 40 participants and will require only projection capabilities for audio-visual equipment.

Work in progress (research-to-practice). The entrepreneurial mindset, as articulated by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network or KEEN, rests on a foundation of three “C”s - Curiosity, Connections, and Creating value. In prior work, we developed an approach to assess students' situational curiosity in response to class activities. We discovered that the creation of real artifacts excited student curiosity and explored the extent to which open-ended problem solving did as well. We have also proposed rubric-based assessments of student designs as a measure of value-creation. The second of the three “C”s, connections, has presented assessment challenges to this point. In this work, we discuss our literature review and search for valid and reliable instruments and subscales for connections. We propose a “2I” model where connections is defined as the ability to “integrate” knowledge to provide “insights”. We also propose an in-class activity similar to a brainstorming exercise already in use in many design-based courses. We have developed a rubric for assessing results of this exercise that can be used to both assess participants' facility with forming connections and as the basis for a conversation with students about how to make more meaningful connections. Further, faculty can use this activity to stimulate students' idea generation about course topics. We have tested this approach in two settings, and find initial results promising. We continue to seek feedback from the community as we work to turn this into a valid and reliable instrument for the assessment of connections through the “2I” model.

Work in progress (innovative practice). Availability of campus maker-spaces has grown significantly over the past decade. While students make use of these tools for their own curiosity, research, and senior design courses, the potential for use of these spaces across the engineering curriculum goes unrealized. With tools such as laser-cutters and 3-D printers readily available to students, faculty need no longer wait for senior design to ask students to physically realize a design that's relevant to a class topic. Our hypothesis was that the primary barrier preventing faculty from assigning in-depth prototype-based class projects was their own unfamiliarity with the tools the students would need to use to create those prototypes. We created a summer workshop on the fabrication capabilities of our maker-spaces and entrepreneurially-minded learning (EML) and delivered it to over 30 faculty and staff in the summer of 2017. Our workshop aimed to increase faculty familiarity with these tools and with the pedagogical approaches that leverage them and thereby empower faculty to assign open-ended, prototype-based experiences that center value-creation. Faculty were further coached on inductive pedagogical approaches such as problem-based learning. The subset of faculty that attended at least three different topical workshops and the pedagogy workshop went on to develop and share new assignments for their courses. This paper describes the workshop content and structure, results of the post-workshop survey, and an overview of the student assignments generated in the workshop. Results to date suggest that faculty did create assignments reaching higher levels within Bloom's taxonomy as a result of the workshop and more fully implement the “value-creation” aspect of EML.

Engineering and Computer Science (E&CS) Education is an emerging discipline and is a subset of the larger field of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. E&CS Education has a relatively brief history, and many individuals who are not directly involved in the discipline are often confused about its purpose. In this special session, we will use up to two background stories to frame the larger questions around E&CS Education goals and help draw the conversation from practice to philosophy while creating a safe space for open conversation addressing issues of change in our discipline.

Some within the engineering education community have asserted that engineering education should be considered a profession. While the formal meaning and identifying characteristics of a profession are debated, in general an individual that is considered professional meets at least three criteria: recognized expertise drawn from a widely accepted body of knowledge, accepted norms of professional behavior, and adherence to codified ethical standards. This paper addresses the third of these issues by exploring canons that could and should be contained within an engineering education code of ethics. To develop the framework for a code of conduct, published ethical codes from four professions-engineering, education, law, and medicine-were analyzed for both content and structure. Both areas of overlap and divergence within the codes were identified. From the areas of overlap between these professional canons a draft code of ethics for engineering education was developed and is compared with the recent American Society for Engineering Education code of ethics. The development process and resulting draft are presented to stimulate larger discussion within the engineering education community around purposes for engineering education.

Our institution has recently committed to develop five new entrepreneurially-minded elective courses called “IDEAS studios”. The entrepreneurially-minded aspects of IDEAS studios include close interaction with industrial partners and an emphasis on topics such as value proposition, opportunity recognition, intellectual property, and customer engagement. We hypothesize that in addition to specific topics and competencies these courses facilitate develop attitudinal skills needed for an entrepreneurial mindset. Such skills - which include persistence, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and self-control - typically cannot be measured using standard assessment methods. In this work-in-progress, we have identified seven structural attributes of IDEAS studios which we hypothesize support the courses' ability to foster the attitudinal aspects of an entrepreneurial mindset. We have designed and are in the process of conducting a study of students enrolled in these courses to assess the impact of both the courses as a whole and the individual attributes on students' situational motivation and curiosity. We hypothesize that the open and student-centered nature of IDEAS studios will foster greater curiosity and intrinsic motivation than will courses that lack these seven attributes. This paper reports on a pilot study of students enrolled in IDEAS studios to assess the impact of these seven structural attributes on students' situational motivation and curiosity.

Engineering and Computer Science (E&CS) Education is an emerging discipline with a brief history and the unfortunate particularity that many folks outside our discipline are confused as to our purpose. In this special session, we will use two case studies to frame the larger questions around E&CS Education goals and help draw the conversation from practice to philosophy while creating a safe space for open conversation.

While scholarship in engineering education is growing in quality and quantity, the extent to which engineering education scholarship influences practice is hotly debated. Multiple factors influence the extent to which research influences practice in any field. While many highlight the reward system as the pivotal factor, changing the reward structure is difficult and assumes extrinsic motivators are effective for faculty. Therefore, this change alone is unlikely to affect faculty priorities vis-a-vis scholarship and teaching. The paper assumes two premises that provide necessary but not sufficient conditions for engineering education scholarship to influence practice. First, the authors assume that the reward system is at worst neutral and may at best reward faculty members who demonstrate they improve student's attainment of learning outcomes. Second, the authors assume that there are effective channels that provide engineering faculty members with concise, accessible, and effective information that they can use to make informed decisions about their teaching. Starting with these two premises, the authors claim another reason research is not influencing practice sufficiently is that, in the language of entrepreneurship, the engineering education community has not provided sufficiently compelling value propositions for engineering faculty members to adopt research based instructional strategies. While the value proposition of engineering education research is clear to researchers, it may not be clear for the majority of engineering faculty members who do not engage in these knowledge-creation activities. An untested claim of this paper is that research advances in engineering education need to be paired with minimum viable value propositions (MWPs) in order to influence practice in engineering classrooms. Herein the authors offer a set of preliminary adoption-based value propositions intended to stimulate active, substantive conversations.

There have always been critics of education and such criticism has led to a slow ebb and flow in the predominant beliefs that surround the purpose of education [1]. However in the last several years a perfect storm appears to be brewing driven by the rising costs of higher education, continuing maturation of information technologies, and a public dialog that often characterizes higher education as in need of reform [2, 3]. While there is no general consensus on the future of higher education generally, and engineering education specifically, some believe that the model of higher education familiar to most engineering faculty will undergo dramatic changes in the next decade [4]. What is the probability that the engineering education will look significantly different in ten years' time? How might our current model be disrupted; how can engineering educators not only prepare for possible disruptions, but take advantage of new opportunities? What new directions for engineering education research open up if the structure of higher education changes? This special session will elicit from the experiences of participants ways they have (or have not) seem disruptive changes on their campus. By comparing experienced change to those predicted in studies that have examined how disruptions might affect higher education [5], we hope to help the session participants develop a preliminary set of theories of change that may guide their decision making and opinions regarding disruptive forces in higher education.

Engineering education encompasses students, faculty, the workforce, and the profession of engineering. This paper provides five snapshots that seek to explore the current state of engineering education from different perspectives of scale: the student, the program, policy, society, and technology. The multifaceted view provided by these snapshots indicates that engineering education is a complex, adaptive system that operates on different spatial and temporal scales. These snapshots are intended both to inform and to raise questions for engineering education researchers, practitioners, administrators, and policy makers. Four interlinking themes are found to thread through each of the five perspectives-the philosophical basis for engineering, the role of experience, resources, and change. The paper concludes with exploration of these themes in the context of engineering education today.