Micah Lande

Disciplinary Discourse in Design Reviews: Industrial Design and Mechanical Engineering Courses

An increase in focus on design thinking in the engineering community and design education has led to innovative outcomes. A part of the design thinking education comes from the goals and teaching methods of instructors. From a given dataset of design reviews two different courses were evaluated: industrial design and mechanical engineering. This work analyzes how instructor interactions with individuals or teams fulfill course outcomes. From a discussion of the data analysis it is suggested that industrial designers focus on the passion of the product design while mechanical engineers focus on the functionality and completeness of the design. The ideological approach in each disciplinary course merge ideology of courses such as industrial design into course such as mechanical engineering. The design thinking push hopes to build future innovators, preparing students for the openendedness of real world problems.

Innovation corps for learning: Evidence-based entrepreneurship™ to improve (STEM) education

The Innovation Corps for Learning (I-Corps-L) is a pilot initiative from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) to study whether the NSF I-Corps model can help to propagate and scale educational innovations. The NSF I-Corps guides teams based on established strategies for business start-ups, using Blanks Lean LaunchPad and Osterwalders Business Model Canvas and associated tools, to build entrepreneurial skills that will encourage mainstream application of their emerging technologies. The overriding goal is improving student learning and success rates in key STEM courses by helping to accelerate the process of bringing effective educational innovations to scale. The project goal of I-Corps-L is to investigate the potential of the I-Corps model for fostering an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community to impact the way innovations are designed and implemented. This Work in Progress describes the features of the I-Corps-L pilot and provides preliminary indications of its applicability for propagating, scaling and sustaining education innovations. Addressing the persistent challenge in STEM education to adopt evidence-based instructional practices is an urgent need as many approaches have been tried yet the rate and extent of adoption are very low.

Work in progress - behavioral aspects of student engineering design experiences

Problem- and project-based learning courses have come to be popular as underlying pedagogies for engineering design classes. Though shown to increase student learning and engagement such active learning approaches also sometimes fall short of addressing student and faculty uneasiness with novel and seemingly unorthodox course designs. Through a planned 2-year qualitative comparison evaluation of two capstone engineering design courses at two different universities, the difficulties and successes of both students and faculty engaged in such courses will be described and characterized on a social plane. Qualitative and projective methods will be utilized to report project development across three dimensions: (1) assignment milestones of design iterations, (2) student and team reflections, and (3) instructor team reports on progress. It is planned that from these affective and social observations, interventions can be constructed and organized into a workshop format for students participating in these problem- and project-based learning engineering design courses.

Should Makers be the engineers of the future

Engineers participate in the Maker movement. Some Makers do not pursue formal engineering education but both the engineering field and their own vocational advancement could readily benefit. We seek to understand Makers and how they are inclusive or exclusive of what can be expected from engineers. From the Engineer of 2020 list of characteristics (National Academy of Engineering, 2004), we highlight practical ingenuity, creativity and lifelong learning for likely opportunities to leverage the Maker experience. The mission of this research is to develop a theory, inductively grounded in data and deductively built on literature, illuminating the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of Makers, describing their pathways in formal engineering education to better inform future innovations in order to improve the practical ingenuity and lifelong learning of our future engineers. Artifact elicitation interviews, based on the method of photo elicitation and critical incident technique interviews will be administered to participants. Results from the inductive and deductive analyses will be triangulated to generate a preliminary theory of Maker knowledge, skills, attitudes, and pathways. This theory, inductively grounded in data and deductively connected to literature, will describe aspects of Makers, along with how their pathways intersect with formal engineering education experiences.

Out of their world: Using alien-centered design for teaching empathy in undergraduate design courses

Designing for others is a paramount focus of teaching user-centered engineering design. This paper presents a novel engineering design brief presented to undergraduate engineering students to design for extra-terrestrials scheduled to visit their collegiate campus. Through this alien-centered design approach, students are pushed to develop empathy for a group of users quite different from themselves and to conceive and design within such an given context. A detailed plan of action is described for both cases with detailed deliverables aligned to course learning objectives. Examples of the interactions students make with their extra-terrestrial users are listed and examples of student work and final deliverables are highlighted. Reflections from the end of project are also included from students and instructors alike. The work presented here may serve as a building block to these types of successful engineering design projects in the classroom.

Might young makers be the engineers of the future

Engineers participate in the Maker movement. Some Makers do not pursue formal engineering education but both the engineering field and their own vocational advancement could readily benefit. We seek to understand Young Makers in K-12 and how might their knowledge, skills, and attitudes prepare them to pursue advanced STEM education and careers. From the Engineer of 2020 list of characteristics we highlight practical ingenuity, creativity and lifelong learning for likely opportunities to leverage the Maker experience. The mission of this research is to develop a theory, inductively grounded in data and deductively built on literature, illuminating the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of Young Makers related to pathways forward to engineering and STEM-related majors and careers. By describing their pathways to or around formal engineering education will better inform future innovations in order to improve the practical ingenuity and lifelong learning of our future engineers. Artifact elicitation interviews, based on the method of photo elicitation and critical incident technique interviews will be administered to participants. Results from the inductive and deductive analyses will be triangulated to generate a preliminary theory of Young Maker knowledge, skills, attitudes, and pathways. This theory, inductively grounded in data and deductively connected to literature, will describe aspects of Young Makers, along with how their pathways forward may intersect with engineering and STEM-related majors and careers. By describing their pathways to or around formal engineering education will better inform future innovations in order to improve the practical ingenuity and lifelong learning of our future engineers.

Monitoring Design Thinking Through In-Situ Interventions

Building on existing knowledge of design and design thinking we apply several other fields of knowledge such as emotion coding, improvisation, ethnography, social psychology, and decision analysis into key metrics we call Design Thinking Metrics (DTM). We applied these metrics to analyze and assess videos of software design teams. We then conducted a workshop series with a professional software design team to use DTM as a perceptual tool to test a number of action-repertoires and building theory that could be used to improve Design Thinking practice. The result is multi-disciplinary perceptual monitoring of design thinking activity in professional software practice.

Creativity and cognition in engineering design: theoretical and pedagogical issues

This workshop will bring together researchers from the engineering design, engineering learning, and creativity communities to explore emerging theoretical and pedagogical issues related to creativity and cognition in engineering design. The need to produce a creative engineering workforce for the 21st century is well recognized. This workshop will help bridge the study of creativity (what is creativity in an engineering context) and cognition (how do engineering students become or act creatively). This workshop will lead to a framework for future research and strategies to prepare creative engineers.

A Conceptual Qualitative Framework for Assessing Human Systems Engineering Education Outcomes and Opportunities

Human systems engineering education seeks to infuse principles of applied psychology, cognitive science, human factors, and user-centered design into the engineering curriculum to help students understand the people they are engineering for (e.g., clients) and their own roles as engineers. This paper outlines a conceptual qualitative framework for formative assessment of students’ incorporation of human systems engineering concepts in their projects and documentation. The framework examines potential conceptual dimensions along with applications, sources, and depth of such knowledge, which we argue can begin to evaluate students’ work and inform iterative efforts to improve human-centered engineering education programs. Example applications of the framework based on several data sets are discussed.

Learning from the parallel pathways of Makers to broaden pathways to engineering

BackgroundMakers are a growing community of STEM-minded people who bridge technical and non-technical backgrounds to imagine, build and fabricate engineering systems. Some have engineering training, some do not. This paper presents a study to explore the educational pathways of adult Makers and how they intersect with engineering. This research is guided by the following research questions: (1) What can we learn about the educational pathways of adult Makers through the lens of constructivist grounded theory? and (2) How do the educational pathways of Makers intersect with engineering? This study relied on qualitative interviews, using artifact elicitation interviews and constructivist critical incident technique interviews, of 42 adult Makers.ResultsThrough inductive analysis of a collection of interviews with Makers, a theme emerged where Makers from different educational backgrounds and with different careers (e.g., art, STEM, business) were making artifacts that had similar purposes. We present two cases of parallel pathways, (1) musical artifacts and (2) large-scale interactive artifacts, to demonstrate the multiple, parallel life pathways that Makers take to making their artifacts and the contextual events and activities that are critical to the direction of these pathways.ConclusionsThe stories and life pathways of adult learners engaged in Making can offer valuable insight into how we might identify practices that promote the access and success of a larger and more diverse population of students for engineering. Makers are engaged in activities that embody the Engineer of 2020 (e.g., lifelong learning, creativity, and practical ingenuity). By studying Makers, we can consider the multiplicity of pathways into engineering majors and careers.