Getting Started Teaching an Undergraduate Engineering Laboratory

2024

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Engineering management

A group of six faculty from laboratory and design courses at a large public university in the Midwest United States recently started a community of practice (CoP) for laboratory and design instructors.The goal of the CoP was to share resources and generate ideas for improving laboratory and design courses after the pandemic.We realized that many of us faced similar challenges during that time as we moved our courses to alternate formats and that we would have benefited from being able to share ideas and collectively brainstorm solutions.Since then, the CoP has grown to almost 40 members representing most of the departments in the college.We have hosted workshops, coffee chats, and other events to facilitate the exchange of ideas between members.Some of the popular topics have been facilitating teamwork; improving inclusivity and belonging; and training laboratory staff.These events have led to us curating resources in these areas.The purpose of this Tips and Tricks paper is to share these resources about teaching laboratory and design courses that we have collected within the CoP with the broader engineering education community, especially for instructors who have recently started teaching a course with a laboratory or large design project.

Designing Capstone Experiences for Interdisciplinarity in Biomedical Engineering Education

2024 · 9 citations

• Computer Science
• Engineering ethics
• Computer Science

Abstract Teamwork is a mainstay of today's workplace environment. This is especially true in healthcare and engineering fields, where work is so interdependent that teams are a dominant means to facilitating progress. Design and capstone courses are one of the places where biomedical engineering students develop skills needed for success in a team-based workplace. Our department participates in several levels of design across programs. This includes Capstone in the Bachelors (BS) program, Professional Capstone in the Master of Engineering (MEng) program, and the Capstone Projects course in the College of Medicine. Having multiple disconnected levels of design presents numerous challenges, such as sourcing projects, structuring the scope of projects, and sharing resources both physical and personnel related. As a result, we elected to develop a shared resource model for projects across these programs in order to meet the needs of each program and to enhance the learning experience and professional preparation for students. In this new model, medical students develop projects based on needs identified during clinical rotations. Medical students then serve as clients for an engineering student team. Engineering teams are composed of MEng student project managers and BS student engineers, working on the project over the course of their capstone classes. Yet, the design and implementation of an interdisciplinary curriculum can be a challenge for instructors and students alike. These challenges may be due to differences in epistemological views, constraints of the higher education system, or a lack of frameworks that support interdisciplinary approaches. In this paper, we will share a framework for a design continuum of biomedically focused projects to provide students within our programs a design experience relevant to appropriate academic, clinical, and industry roles and functions while optimizing department resources. To develop the collaboration, we applied an evidence-based science approach to conduct a human-centered design study integrated with insights from the literature to develop a more general understanding of the nature, form, and opportunities of cross-boundary coordination across multiple programs and multiple types of projects. Through multiple stakeholder analyses we created an updated design experience where medical school students, masters, and bachelors students worked together toward a common project goal. This paper summarizes results from a one-year pilot of the collaboration. The framework includes defined competencies and deliverables for each program along the spectrum of engineering design. Additionally, quantitative and qualitative surveys along with assessment of artifacts from the collaborative projects were used to assess the success of the framework. The strategies discussed in this paper may provide insight into the ways that collaboration among co-instructors can support the creation of learning experiences that overcome the challenges of isolated disciplinary experiences.

Experiential Learning: Exploring Nuances When Making Ethical Decisions in a Capstone Design Course

Biomedical Engineering Education · 2023 · 5 citations

• Sociology
• Engineering ethics
• Computer Science

Training Students to Establish and Maintain Positive Group Dynamics in Design and Design-Based Classes

2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) · 2023 · 2 citations

• Computer Science
• Mathematics education
• Psychology

Teaming of students in design-based engineering courses improves outcomes for projects and replicates the working environment of engineers. Yet the group-level and individual benefits of working in groups depend on healthy group function. In lab and design-based courses, where assignments are typically more open-ended and have high levels of interdependency, unhealthy group dynamics lead to issues such as inequitable division of labor and an undervaluing of certain students' thoughts and ideas. Context-based strategies like pre-assigned groups, task design, or peer grading mitigate these issues, but do not necessarily improve students' abilities to work together. We propose a learner-centered approach to group work in classes, in which instructors use context strategies while training students to establish, maintain, and repair group dynamics across the duration of a semester of instruction. Facilitated by a community of practice of laboratory and design instructors, common assignments to establish and support healthy group dynamics were administered in four design-focused courses at a large public university. Interventions included a beginning of semester team contract activity, a mid-semester reflection activity, and an end of semester self- and peer evaluation. This Work-in-Progress presents this Innovative Practice in its development and early assessment stages. Guiding principles and implementation across multiple course contexts are described, with suggestions as to how instructors may respond to information from these interventions. The aim of this work is for instructors to get a sense of how such a longitudinal, student-centered approach to team dynamics may be applied in their own teaching practice.