Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.18260/1-2--47929

Publication Title

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Pages

16 pp.

Conference Name

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, June 23-26, 2024, Portland, Oregon

Abstract

Engineering is becoming increasingly cross-disciplinary, requiring students to develop skills in multiple engineering disciplines (e.g., mechanical engineering students having to learn the basics of electronics, instrumentation, and coding) and interprofessional skills to integrate perspectives from people outside their field. In the workplace, engineering teams are frequently multidisciplinary, and often, people from outside of engineering are part of the team that brings a product to market. Additionally, teams are often diverse in age, race, gender, and in other areas. Teams that creatively utilize the contrasting perspectives and ideas arising from these differences can positively affect team performance and generate solutions effective for a broader range of users. These trends suggest that engineering education can benefit from having engineering students work on team projects that involve a blend of cross-disciplinary and mixed-aged collaborations. An NSF-funded project set out to explore this idea by partnering undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a 300-level electromechanical systems course with preservice teachers enrolled in a 400-level educational technology course to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth graders at a local school. Working in small teams, students designed, built, and coded bio-inspired robots. The collaborative activities included: (1) training with Hummingbird Bit hardware (Birdbrain Technologies, Pittsburgh, PA) (e.g. sensors, servo motors) and coding platform, (2) preparing robotics lessons for fifth graders that explained the engineering design process, and (3) guiding the fifth graders in the design of their robots.

Additionally, each engineering student designed a robot following the theme developed with their education student and fifth-grade partners. This paper reports on the reflections of the engineering students after completing a cross-disciplinary robotics project with preservice teachers and fifth graders with the goals of (1) assessing the suitability of the project to the specific course, (2) analyzing the nature of the balance between course and project workload/objectives, (3) benefits and challenges of participating in the project, and (4) evaluating the overall effectiveness of the intervention. Student reflections collected at the conclusion of the semester from implementations in Spring 2022 and Spring 2023 were analyzed for this study. Findings from a thematic qualitative analysis of the reflections revealed benefits such as students’ perceived gains in coding skills, reinforcement of engineering concepts learned in class, acquisition of interprofessional skills (e.g., communication with technical and non-technical audiences, cross-disciplinary collaboration), and engineering-pedagogical skills such as lesson planning and classroom management. Students also reflected on opportunities to incorporate creative design insights when brainstorming with non-engineers. Students’ perceived challenges were mainly related to workload, time management, course organization, and teaching/interacting with the fifth graders. These findings provide insightful suggestions for future interventions in undergraduate engineering courses.

Rights

© 2024 American Society for Engineering Education.

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference.

Original Publication Citation

Kaipa, K., Kidd, J., Kumi, I., Ringleb, S., Ayala, O., Gutierrez, K., Pazos, P., Cima, F., & Rhemer, D. (2024). Reflections of undergraduate engineering students completing a cross-disciplinary robotics project with pre-service teachers and fifth graders in an electromechanical systems course [Paper presentation]. 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47929

ORCID

0000-0002-8095-938X (Kaipa), 0000-0001-9800-1690 (Kidd), 0000-0003-3376-0252 (Ringleb), 0000-0003-0604-8606 (Ayala), 0000-0003-4348-7798 (Pazos), 0000-0002-1453-2353 (Cima), 0000-0002-5675-5045 (Rhemer)

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