Capturing the Design Thinking of Young Children Interacting with a Parent

Children have often been labeled as “natural engineers” whose curiosity about the world around them evokes comparisons to skills used by professional engineers and taught to undergraduate engineering students. Building towers out of blocks, taking things apart and figuring how things work are a part of childhood and have been considered to be precursors to engineering thinking.However there has been considerable debate around what engineering looks like for young children. Can young children engage in design and if so, what does that look like? How can we differentiate “design” (especially “modeling” or “create”) activity from normal everyday play?Several design models have taken into account the developmental stages of young children, but they often are based on assumptions and have minimal evidence.In the GRADIENT (Gender Research on Adult-child Discussions within Informal ENgineering environmenTs) study, a collaboration between researchers at a museum and university, we looked at how parents with young girls engage in two different engineering activities in informal settings. The first setting is a Preschool Play dates program for children 3-5 years old, where the parent-daughter dyads were asked to build a tower first out of familiar materials (foam blocks)and then out of unfamiliar materials (dado squares). The second setting is a pneumatic ball run that is part of an engineering exhibit at the museum and was focused on children 6-11 years old.In each setting, 30 dyads were video recorded, and the verbal and non-verbal segments were open and axially coded for engineering talk and action.We found that children engage in the engineering design process in ways that are similar to other models of the engineering design, that include problem scoping, idea generation, modeling,testing, evaluation and revision. We also found that children engage in both predictive and reflective behavior, and often add context to the problem. However, we want to acknowledge that the way children engage in engineering thinking is different from the way that adults do(especially with idea generation and revision) and we will discuss this further in the paper. This work lays a foundation for future research, as understanding how children engage in the design process can help us understand how children learn engineering design skills, and how people develop engineering design skills across pre-college, undergraduate, and professional practice.The work also has implications for the development of learning experiences in both school and out-of-school settings

Linking teaching and research in disciplines and departments

This paper supports the effective links between teaching and discipline-based research in disciplinary communities and in academic departments. It is authored by Alan Jenkins, Mick Healey and Roger Zetter

Communities in university mathematics

This paper concerns communities of learners and teachers that are formed, develop and interact in university mathematics environments through the theoretical lens of Communities of Practice. From this perspective, learning is described as a process of participation and reification in a community in which individuals belong and form their identity through engagement, imagination and alignment. In addition, when inquiry is considered as a fundamental mode of participation, through critical alignment, the community becomes a Community of Inquiry. We discuss these theoretical underpinnings with examples of their application in research in university mathematics education and, in more detail, in two Research Cases which focus on mathematics students' and teachers' perspectives on proof and on engineering students' conceptual understanding of mathematics. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on the theorising of the role of communities in university level teaching and learning and a consideration of ways forward for future research

Emerging cad and bim trends in the aec education: An analysis from students\u27 perspective

As the construction industry is moving towards collaborative design and construction practices globally, training the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) students professionally related to CAD and BIM became a necessity rather than an option. The advancement in the industry has led to collaborative modelling environments, such as building information modelling (BIM), as an alternative to computer-aided design (CAD) drafting. Educators have shown interest in integrating BIM into the AEC curriculum, where teaching CAD and BIM simultaneously became a challenge due to the differences of two systems. One of the major challenges was to find the appropriate teaching techniques, as educators were unaware of the AEC students’ learning path in CAD and BIM. In order to make sure students learn and benefit from both CAD and BIM, the learning path should be revealed from students’ perspective. This paper summarizes the background and differences of CAD and BIM education, and how the transition from CAD to BIM can be achieved for collaborative working practices. The analysis was performed on freshman and junior level courses to learn the perception of students about CAD and BIM education. A dual-track survey was used to collect responses from AEC students in four consecutive years. The results showed that students prefer BIM to CAD in terms of the friendliness of the user-interface, help functions, and self-detection of mistakes. The survey also revealed that most of the students believed in the need for a BIM specialty course with Construction Management (CM), Structure, and Mechanical-Electrical-Plumbing (MEP) areas. The benefits and challenges of both CAD and BIM-based software from students’ perspectives helps to improve the learning outcomes of CAD/BIM courses to better help students in their learning process, and works as a guideline for educators on how to design and teach CAD/BIM courses simultaneously by considering the learning process and perspectives of students. © 2018 The autho

Becoming a Scientist: Using First-Year Undergraduate Science Courses to Promote Identification with Science Disciplines

In this qualitative study, we examined how two professors (a physicist and biochemist) of first year college students perceived their students’ development of identification in biochemistry or physics and how they actively supported this development. The professors described students who entered college with different levels of domain identification and different expectations for their college science experience depending upon whether they were in a biochemistry or physics major. Although neither professor was familiar with research related to the concept of domain identification, their beliefs about their students’ identification and academic support strategies generally aligned with the Osborne and Jones (2011) model of academic identification

STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Science is on our minds at Linfield. Students and faculty spent the summer collaborating on research in the sciences, mathematics and technology, both here and abroad