2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

What do Undergraduate Engineering Students and Pre-service Teachers Learn by Collaborating and Teaching Engineering and Coding Through Robotics?

Presented at Faculty and Student Perspective on Instructional Strategies

This research paper presents preliminary results of an NSF-supported interdisciplinary collaboration between undergraduate engineering students and preservice teachers. The fields of engineering and elementary education share similar challenges when it comes to preparing undergraduate students for the new demands they will encounter in their profession. Engineering students need interprofessional skills that will help them value and negotiate the contributions of various disciplines while working on problems that require a multidisciplinary approach. Increasingly, the solutions to today's complex problems must integrate knowledge and practices from multiple disciplines and engineers must be able to recognize when expertise from outside their field can enhance their perspective and ability to develop innovative solutions. However, research suggests that it is challenging even for professional engineers to understand the roles, responsibilities, and integration of various disciplines, and engineering curricula have traditionally left little room for development of non-technical skills such as effective communication with a range of audiences and an ability to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams. Meanwhile, preservice teachers need new technical knowledge and skills that go beyond traditional core content knowledge, as they are now expected to embed engineering into science and coding concepts into traditional subject areas. There are nationwide calls to integrate engineering and coding into PreK-6 education as part of a larger campaign to attract more students to STEM disciplines and to increase exposure for girls and minority students who remain significantly underrepresented in engineering and computer science. Accordingly, schools need teachers who have not only the knowledge and skills to integrate these topics into mainstream subjects, but also the intention to do so. However, research suggests that preservice teachers do not feel academically prepared and confident enough to teach engineering-related topics.

This interdisciplinary project provided engineering students with an opportunity to develop interprofessional skills as well as to reinforce their technical knowledge, while preservice teachers had the opportunity to be exposed to engineering content, more specifically coding, and develop competence for their future teaching careers. Undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a computational methods course and preservice teachers enrolled in an educational technology course partnered to plan and deliver robotics lessons to fifth and sixth graders. This paper reports on the effects of this collaboration on twenty engineering students and eight preservice teachers. T-tests were used to compare participants’ pre-/post- scores on a coding quiz. A post-lesson written reflection asked the undergraduate students to describe their robotics lessons and what they learned from interacting with their cross disciplinary peers and the fifth/sixth graders. Content analysis was used to identify emergent themes. Engineering students’ perceptions were generally positive, recounting enjoyment interacting with elementary students and gaining communication skills from collaborating with non-technical partners. Preservice teachers demonstrated gains in their technical knowledge as measured by the coding quiz, but reported lacking the confidence to teach coding and robotics independently of their partner engineering students. Both groups reported gaining new perspectives from working in interdisciplinary teams and seeing benefits for the fifth and sixth grade participants, including exposing girls and students of color to engineering and computing.

Authors

Dr. Jennifer Jill Kidd Old Dominion University [biography]

Dr. Jennifer Kidd is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion University. Her research interests include engineering education, computational thinking, student-authored digital content, classroom assessment, especially peer review, and diversity issues. She currently has support from the National Science Foundation for two projects related to engineering education for preservice teachers.
Dr. Krishnanand Kaipa http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-8095-938X Old Dominion University [biography]

Dr. Krishnanand Kaipa is an Assistant Professor and director of the Collaborative Robotics and Adaptive Machines (CRAM) Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Old Dominion University. Dr. Kaipa received his BE (Hons.) in Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India in 1998, and his MS in 2004 and PhD in 2008, both in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He worked as a postdoctoral associate at Department of Computer Science, University of Vermont and later at Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, where he was also a research assistant professor. Dr. Kaipa’s research interests include biologically inspired robotics, human-robot collaboration, embodied cognition, and swarm intelligence. Dr. Kaipa is a member of ASME and IEEE.
Mr. Samuel J. Sacks Norfolk Public Schools [biography]

After graduating from Virginia Tech with a BS in Sociology and Political Science in 2014, Mr. Sacks continued his education through Old Dominion University's K-6 teacher education masters program. Mr. Sacks is currently teaching 4th grade social studies at the Academy for Discovery at Lakewood in Norfolk, Virginia. He lives with his girlfriend, Hillary, and their cat, Snuggles.
Dr. Stacie I. Ringleb Old Dominion University [biography]

Stacie Ringleb is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Old Dominion University. Dr. Ringleb received a B.S. in biomedical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 1997, a M.S.E. from Temple University in Mechanical Engineering in 1999, and a PhD from Drexel University in Mechanical Engineering in 2003. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Orthopedic Biomechanics Lab at the Mayo Clinic. Dr. Ringleb research interests include, biomechanics and rehabilitation engineering as well as multi-disciplinary approaches to improving engineering education.
Dr. Pilar Pazos http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4348-7798 Old Dominion University [biography]

Pilar Pazos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA. Her main areas of research interest are collaborative work-structures, virtual teams and team decision-making and performance.
Dr. Kristie Gutierrez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9339-7574 Old Dominion University [biography]

Dr. Gutierrez received her B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001, M.Ed. in Secondary Science Education in 2005 from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Ph.D. in Science Education in 2016 from North Carolina State University. Dr. Gutierrez is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Old Dominion University. She teaches elementary science methods and secondary science and mathematics methods courses with emphasis on multicultural education and equity pedagogies. Her research interests include both formal and informal STEM education, with specialization in the integration of engineering and computer science into science education through preservice and inservice educator development.
Dr. Orlando M. Ayala Old Dominion University [biography]

Dr. Ayala received his BS in Mechanical Engineering with honors (Cum Laude) from Universidad de Oriente (Venezuela) in 1995, MS in Mechanical Engineering in 2001 and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 2005, both from University of Delaware (USA). Dr. Ayala is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Technology Department, Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA.

Prior to joining ODU in 2013, Dr. Ayala spent three years as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Delaware where he expanded his knowledge on simulation of multiphase flows while acquiring skills in high-performance parallel computing and scientific computation. Before that, Dr. Ayala held a faculty position at Universidad de Oriente at Mechanical Engineering Department where he taught and developed graduate and undergraduate courses for a number of subjects such as Fluid Mechanics, Heat Transfer, Thermodynamics, Multiphase Flows, Fluid Mechanics and Hydraulic Machinery, as well as Mechanical Engineering Laboratory courses.

In addition, Dr. Ayala has had the opportunity to work for a number of engineering consulting companies, which have given him an important perspective and exposure to the industry. He has been directly involved in at least 20 different engineering projects related to a wide range of industries from the petroleum and natural gas industry to brewing and newspaper industries. Dr. Ayala has provided service to professional organizations such as ASME. Since 2008 he has been a member of the Committee of Spanish Translation of ASME Codes and the ASME Subcommittee on Piping and Pipelines in Spanish. Under both memberships, the following Codes have been translated: ASME B31.3, ASME B31.8S, ASME B31Q and ASME BPV Sections I.

While maintaining his industrial work active, his research activities have also been very active; Dr. Ayala has published 90 journal and peer-reviewed conference papers. His work has been presented in several international forums in Austria, the USA, Venezuela, Japan, France, Mexico, and Argentina. Dr. Ayala has an average citation per year of all his published work of 44.78.
Dr. Lilian Maria de Souza Almeida Old Dominion University [biography]

Dr. Lilian Almeida received her Ph.D. in Engineering Education in 2019 and has been working with research in the field since 2016.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2020, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 26, 2021

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