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Creativity plays an important role in engineering problem solving, particularly when solving an ill-structured problem, and has been a topic of increasing research interest in recent years. Prior research on creativity has been conducted in problem solving settings, predominantly focusing on undergraduate engineering students, including how faculty can foster creativity in engineering students, how engineering faculty perceive their students' creativity, and how to measure it. However, more work is needed to examine engineering faculty and practitioner perspectives on the role of creativity when they solve an engineering problem themselves. Since engineering students learn problem solving, at least initially, mainly from their professors, it is essential to understand how faculty perceive their own creativity in problem solving. Similarly, given that practitioners solve ill-structured engineering problems on a regular basis in the workplace and that most of the students go on to work in the engineering industry when they graduate and ultimately become practitioners, it is also important to explore practitioner perspectives on creativity in problem solving settings. As part of an ongoing NSF-funded study, this paper investigates how engineering faculty's and practitioners' creativity influences their problem solving processes, how their perspectives on creativity in a problem solving environment differ, and what factors impact their creativity. Five tenure-track faculty in civil engineering and five practitioners were interviewed after they solved an ill-structured engineering problem. Participants' responses were transcribed and coded using initial coding. This paper discusses their responses to semi-structured interview questions. The findings suggest that faculty and practitioners feel more creative when they are familiar with the subject area of a problem. If they are aware of a particular solution that has been developed and used before or have access to resources to look them up, they may not necessarily embrace creativity. The findings indicate differences not only across faculty and practitioners but also within the faculty and practitioner participants. Similarities and differences between faculty and practitioners in creative problem solving and the themes that emerged are discussed and recommendations for educators are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper describes a case study of the ways that engineering students demonstrate emerging engineering judgment as they make assumptions needed to model and solve an openended, ill-structured engineering science homework problem. Engineering judgment is the set of practices that engineers employ to develop mathematical models to solve the ill-structured problems encountered by professional engineers. Engineering science homework presents an underutilized opportunity for students to develop and rehearse mathematical modeling and engineering judgment by engaging with ill-structured problems. This study unpacks students' emerging engineering judgment as they identify, make, and revise assumptions to develop mathematical models to solve an ill-structured engineering science homework problem. This study asks: How do these students select, evaluate, and revise assumptions while they develop mathematical models? What do these students take into consideration as they make assumptions to develop mathematical models? We took a case study approach to look closely at the ways students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. This case took place in the context of a Statics course required of second-year engineering students at a large public university. Over fifteen weeks, the focal team of four students worked to model a swimming pool lift capable of assisting a swimmer to enter and exit the water. We identified moments in which students made assumptions that served as the bases for mathematical models. In this paper, we describe and present examples of the ways that these students selected, evaluated, and revised assumptions while solving this problem. Our analysis suggests that to make assumptions, these students considered ways to simplify the problem, the instructor's grading practices, materials availability, and system function. We conjecture that the open-ended nature of the focal problem scaffolded students to make assumptions, and that their assumption-making processes were shaped by their perceptions of the problem as both a "real-world" problem and a "school assignment." This study contributes to understanding the development of engineering judgment and points to the potential for illstructured engineering science problems to support students to develop and rehearse engineering judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress research paper explores faculty's experiences during their own undergraduate programs, as well as the role of health and wellbeing in their success as students. The culture of stress and hardship promoted in engineering education has been scrutinized as negatively affecting students, especially those from marginalized groups. However, little is currently known about the interactions among multiple actors in the engineering education ecosystem and their contributions to perpetuating such culture. Faculty directly impact students' experiences in engineering programs through first-hand interactions with students. These interactions can propagate professional beliefs and attitudes that our graduates instill and further propagate. Thus, faculty may be re-enacting attitudes that they learned through their own experiences as students. Therefore, their beliefs might bring insights into elements that have been persistent in the engineering education narrative. In this work in progress paper, we use the model of engineering thriving to analyze interviews with four engineering faculty and analyze the transcripts using inductive and deductive thematic analysis. This study is part of a larger project to contribute to the efforts to evolve engineering's current culture of hardship and suffering to one that recognizes health, wellbeing, and thriving permeating essential academic spaces like the classroom. In this project, we seek to understand faculty conceptualizations of health and well-being that developed through their undergraduate and graduate experiences. Our preliminary results show that the undergraduate experiences of faculty included elements of thriving and well-being such as self-knowledge and self-control. Some identified key turning points in realizing their best strategies to maximize their well-being and academic success, which enhanced their decision-making abilities. Furthermore, some participants achieved academic success despite poor well-being and thriving outcomes, which raises questions about the cultural and systemic factors that promote such dualism. In terms of the messages they received about well-being, faculty recognized the absence of explicit messages but acknowledged the existence of institutional structures that could support them if necessary (such as counseling services or professional societies). Finally, when comparing their experiences with those of current undergraduates, faculty identify issues with excessive technology, imposter syndrome, low extracurricular engagement, and low functionality among the elements against the newer generation's wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper explores engineering experts' perceptions of the most important factors of thriving for undergraduate engineering students. Faculty, staff, and members of the engineering education system play a vital role in creating environments, and forming relationships with students conducive to thriving. The study in this paper builds upon prior work on engineering thriving that identified 147 factors developed from a literature review, refined with expert consultation. Out of the long list of factors, little is known regarding the most important factors that can serve as a starting point for engineering experts with limited resources to create environments and relationships that support more thriving engineering students. In this paper, we analyze ranked order data to investigate the most important internal thriving competencies. Participants include 47 engineering experts i.e., engineering administrators, professors, staff, and advisers. To find which competencies were perceived as most important to engineering thriving, each expert was asked to generate and define up to ten competencies that they considered to be most important, then rank these competencies in order of importance. During data analysis, ranked competencies were scored on a reverse ordinal points basis, with the most important rankings receiving 10 points and the least important rankings receiving 1 point. Overall, the top five most important competencies were Communication/Listening Skills (overall score = 104), Help-seeking/Resourcefulness (overall score = 104), Teamwork (overall score = 97), Time Management (overall score = 96), and Resilience (overall score = 95). Findings from this study highlight the importance of intrapersonal, social, and behavioral competencies, providing a starting point for future work developing a survey of thriving for engineering students. Furthermore, these findings provide a greater insight into which high-impact competencies engineering faculty, staff, and administrators can focus on when creating environments conducive to student thriving and interacting directly with students when teaching, supporting, advising, and mentoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disabled people continue to be significantly underrepresented and marginalized in engineering. Current reports indicate that approximately 26 percent of US adults have some form of disability. Yet only 6 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in engineering programs belong to this group. Several barriers have been identified that discourage and even prohibit people with disabilities from participating in engineering including arduous accommodations processes, lack of institutional support, and negative peer, staff, and faculty attitudes. These barriers are perpetuated and reinforced by a variety of ableist sociocultural norms and definitions that rely on popularized tropes and medicalized models that influence the ways this group experiences school to become engineers. In this paper, we seek to contribute to conversations that shape understanding of disability identity and the ways it is conceptualized in engineering programs. We revisit interview data from an ongoing grounded theory exploration of professional identity formation of undergraduate civil engineering students who identify as having one or more disabilities. Through our qualitative analysis, we identified overarching themes that contribute to understanding of how participants define and integrate disability identity to form professional identities and the ways they reshape and contribute to the civil engineering field through this lens. Emergent themes include experiencing/considering disability identity as a fluid experience, as a characteristic that 'sets you apart', and as a medicalized symptom or condition. Findings from this work can be used by engineering educators and administrators to inform more effective academic and personal support structures to destigmatize disability and promote the participation and inclusion of students and colleagues with disabilities in engineering and in our academic and professional communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Summer Academy in Sustainable Manufacturing is an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site that offers unique summer undergraduate research experiences in the challenging field of sustainable manufacturing to national undergraduate students from two and four-year institutions. The objective of the REU Site is to introduce undergraduate students to the forefront of sustainable manufacturing research and to provide participants with the skills and pathways to pursue advanced degrees or careers in sustainable manufacturing. The intensive tenweek summer research and professional development experience hosts ten students per summer and addresses National Science Foundation priority areas such as advanced manufacturing and sustainability. Undergraduate research projects in the REU site address manufacturing process, manufacturing system, and fundamental sustainable manufacturing principles within continuous (e.g. chemical manufacturing) and discrete (e.g. automotive manufacturing) manufacturing systems. Projects are further associated with topics that cross cut the aforementioned thrust areas such as, emerging and environmentally benign materials manufacturing, sustainable process design and control, and life-cycle engineering and value recovery. Traditionally, this REU Site hosts in-person undergraduate researchers to undertake their research projects in a faculty mentor laboratory during the program. However, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated that the REU Site program be held virtually during the summer of 2021. This poster and summary paper detail the steps taken to transition REU Site program activities to a virtual environment and postprogram evaluation results of participant experiences. Evaluation results of the virtual program are compared to evaluation results of prior in-person Summer Academy in Sustainable Manufacturing programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finite element analysis (FEA) is a powerful tool that allows engineers to evaluate how well a structure can withstand a given loading environment. While commercial FEA software has a wide range of capacities, it requires substantial insight and a minimum requisite skillset in undergraduate mechanics to generate meaningful results. The purpose of an undergraduate finite element course is to build such insight within the minds of students. This is typically done utilizing both theory and practical application via commercial FEA software. Unfortunately, both the "user-friendliness" and generality of commercial software may make it more difficult for students to understand its inner workings (e.g., how geometrically assigned constraints are translated to nodal constraints). The work presented in this paper attempts to address this issue by having students contribute to their own 2D FEA code. This allows the student to see how concepts, such as 2D element quality checks, are integrated as each is brought in as an additional subroutine to the code. Also, writing one's own code allows one to showcase more easily where exactly simplified element formulations recover exact solutions from strength of materials, as well as idealized problems that unambiguously demonstrate how FEA is not always conservative as a design tool. MATLAB Grader is used to facilitate the coding process for students by allowing instructorguided scaffolding of the code, providing instantaneous formative feedback, and ensuring that their code runs as expected. The 2D FEA code could then be used for simple problems involving 1D beam and 2D plane stress elements with the intention of demonstrating practical aspects of FEA. This includes model development concepts such as the appropriate connectivity between different element types. It also addresses results interpretation, such as problems wherein analytical solutions used to validate FEA solutions are nearly always expressed in terms of specific stress components and not in terms of effective, e.g., Von Mises, quantities. The results from the 2D FEA code may also be compared with results from a commercial FEA program such as ANSYS Workbench to help the students directly see the integration of FEA theory in practice. A cursory assessment of the effectiveness of this process has been measured via a Qualtrics survey distributed towards the end of the term. The survey intends to gather the students' subjective experience regarding MATLAB Grader and the development and use of the 2D FEA code. Survey results are separated from any student identifiers and are not tied to student performance in the course. The authors intend to pursue a more rigorous assessment regarding the effect of this process on students' conceptual understanding in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]