Molly Goldstein’s research while affiliated with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and other places

Worldwide, engineering design is seeing an increase in pre-college settings due to changing educational policies and standards. Additionally, these projects can help students develop critical skills for a broad range of problem settings, such as design thinking and reflection. In design and other contexts, reflection is a mental process where someone returns to previous experience and uses this revisiting to aid in new actions. While there is substantial research studying design practices at the collegiate or professional level, the design practices of younger students remain understudied. Moreover, past research on reflection has tended to focus on how to support reflection or what impact reflection has and not how students engage in reflection strategies. We had 105 middle school students in the Midwestern United States design a green-energy home using a computer-aided design (CAD) tool, Energy3D. Students were instructed to use Energy3D’s design journal to reflect on their design process throughout the project, enabling students to employ different reflection strategies. Energy3D unobtrusively captures students’ design actions, including journal interactions; these were used to identify students' reflection strategies. Three features of journal interaction were developed, i.e., frequency of interaction across sessions, intensity of interaction, and relative frequency of journal use over other actions. We used k-means cluster analysis on these features and discovered four groups representing different strategies. Regression was used to understand the relationship between reflection strategies and design outcomes. Finally, we draw out implications for supporting pre-college students' productive beginnings of engagement in reflection and future study directions.

Empathy has received increased attention for its role in engineering design. While research on empathy in engineering and engineering design is still relatively new, there are already several definitions or models of empathic design for engineers. Moreover, there are a variety of ways that scholars have integrated empathy into engineering design curricula. In this study, to better understand how instructors can integrate empathy into engineering design curricula and unveil the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of its integration, eight engineering design instructors formed a collaborative inquiry (CI) group. In CI, members act as researchers and participants to collectively explore their experiences with a topic of interest. The participant-researchers of the CI group for this study formed out of a larger project that seeks to create a model of empathy in engineering design and instrumentation to assess the model's manifestation in students' engineering design experiences. In this larger project, several tensions emerged related to empathy's integration into engineering design education. In response, we formed the CI group to address the question, ''What tensions are experienced by engineering design researchers and educators regarding the construct of empathy in our educational practice?'' Tensions recognize that problems or challenges may have two or more responses. The CI team met six times to identify tensions regarding empathy in engineering design as experienced in their teaching practice. Through our collaborative inquiry, we generated a model that represents our understanding of these tensions. The model included ten themes, which included four empathy frames (definition, value, manifestation, and pragmatics) and six intersections between these frames. Our results share insights from our discussion on five of the ten themes. We close the paper by reflecting on the model and the process of building the model. We offer that the model can be useful for other design instructors to integrate empathy into their curriculum and practices for thoughtfully responding to these tensions. We hope this work can help extend and facilitate ongoing research on empathy in engineering design.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is a standard design tool used in engineering practice and by students. CAD has become increasingly analytic and inventive in incorporating AI approaches to design with generative design to help expand designers' divergent thinking. However, because generative design technologies are new, we know very little about generative design thinking in students. The purpose of this research is threefold: explore how students engage in the design process when using generative design software, understand the relationship between students' divergent and convergent thinking abilities, and investigate in what ways students' divergent and convergent abilities are related to their generative design understanding. This study was set in an introductory graphics and design course where student designers used Fusion 360. Data collected included a generative design CAD module and both divergent and convergent psychological tests. The results suggest that students approach generative design decision-making similarly to how beginning designers approach standard decision-making and that students' divergent and convergent thinking is not related to their generative design thinking. This study shows that new computational tools might present the same challenges to beginning designers as conventional tools. Instructors should be aware of informed design practices, should continue to encourage students to grow into informed designers by educating them on design practices without technology and, by introducing them to new technology such as AI-driven generative design.

Engineers contribute to large-scale socio-technical challenges, and human-centered design offers a design thinking approach that helps engineers develop a thorough understanding of the socio-technical effects of their design work. Thus, effective strategies for assessing and teaching human-centered design are needed. This study aimed to identify course characteristics that influence how students experience human-centered design in an introductory systems engineering design course. First, we categorized open-ended written reflections to understand the degree to which students experienced human-centered design. Second, we performed a thematic analysis to characterize salient course experiences for two groups of students: (1) students who experienced human-centered design in a technology-centered (i.e., non-human-centered) way and (2) students who used user input to guide their design thinking and thus experienced design in a human-centered way. Finally, we identify commonalities in course experiences across these two groups of students. Our analysis suggested that most students did not prioritize human-centered design approaches during the course. Most students strived for technical perfectionism, centered CAD competencies, fixated on novel design, and prioritized design decision-making tools. However, students who demonstrated human-centered design approaches integrated user research into their design process, valued communication, and expressed feeling a tension between user information and course requirements. While students may complete the same design course, their design experiences will vary. We provide a heuristic that we encourage instructors to utilize to identify students’ ways of experiencing design. Moreover, we encourage instructors to extend study findings to help non-human-centered designers bridge the divide between social and technical knowledge.

Background: Experiential design opportunities are valuable for helping engineering students realize three-dimensional implications of theoretical concepts taught in the classroom. However, research on effective hands-on task design in the context of undergraduate group problem solving is relatively limited. While some tasks may include three-dimensional representation of task content, there is still much to be understood about how hands-on tasks influence students’ collaboration. Purpose/Hypothesis: To understand the impact of product characteristics on learning outcomes for undergraduate engineering students during a collaborative dissection task, we observed 16 students for collaboration quality as they worked in groups of four to reverse-engineer products through physical deconstruction and modeling in computer-aided design (CAD). Design/Method: We used a multiple-case study format to qualitatively analyze the groups. Ethnographic observations were recorded during three dissection sessions for each group. To understand groups’ experiences during the task, we coded our observations for behaviors that included collaborating versus going off-task, tendency to interact verbally, dividing into subgroups versus working as a whole group, and engaging in dissection and other physical interaction with the product. Results: We observed that dissection product characteristics impacted group collaboration, which in turn may have influenced the quality of their final modeling scores. These findings are supported by a positive relationship between participation in dissection and task scores. Conclusions: The study indicates that task products can impact the quality of collaboration and, in turn, students’ performance. More specifically, the nuances imposed by product characteristics can directly impact group interactions. Task products should be selected with attention to how characteristics may impact students’ opportunities to engage and interact.