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Capstone design is a critical culminating experience in the academic trajectory of all undergraduate engineering students. At the University of San Diego, each year a handful of engineering capstone design teams out of the several dozen across the college work on community-partnered projects. The projects are seeded and nurtured by efforts from a formalized university initiative, the Engineering Exchange for Social Justice. During the 2021-2022 academic year, the authors of this paper were instructors for the year-long, multidisciplinary engineering capstone design course. The course structure and timeline cater to traditional, corporate/industry-sponsored projects. Three out of ten teams across our two course sections worked on community-partnered projects. We sought to learn about the student experience for those working on the community project teams. Each team member completed a reflection assignment with specified prompts at the end of the fall and spring semester. We analyzed the reflections using inductive thematic analysis. We identified 'Justice' and 'Connectivity' as primary themes, which connect to sociotechnical proficiencies we hoped to develop in the students. However, the reflections also highlighted challenges and shortcomings of our current model. For this work-in-progress paper, we share our salient findings from each theme, as well as instructor observations and lessons-learned from this community project capstone model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spring of 2022, the University of San Diego integrated engineering department offered a new sociotechnical solar energy course for junior and senior students. The course differed from traditional, technical upper-division engineering electives by facilitating student learning through a semester-long, team-based solar energy project that students worked on while concurrently gaining technical insights through lectures and problem sets. Informed by place-based pedagogies and culturally sustaining pedagogies, we designed the course to be relevant to the students' lived experiences by coupling the learning about technical elements of solar energy with a focus on solar energy projects on campus. Prior to running the course, we studied the university's Energy Master Plan, learned about the current state of solar energy on campus, and identified four potential new solar projects. We divided the 14 students in the class into four teams, with each team conducting a feasibility assessment for their solar project over the course of the class. Students started by exploring the solar we already have on campus. Once familiarized with the current system, we guided the students in completing their assessments of the new projects through four, two-week phases, with each phase focusing on a different sociotechnical analysis for their project: 1) social, 2) technical, 3) economic, and 4) environmental. During the fifth and final phase, 'integration,' we supported the students in integrating their analyses from each phase and making final, all-class recommendations to the university about how to proceed with solar energy investments on campus. In this paper, we share our findings from implementing this sociotechnical learning approach gained from student reflections, and our own observations and reflections from the course experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US-Sweden Clinical Bioinformatics Research Training Program is an NSF-funded International Research Experience for Students (IRES) program that aims to develop a diverse cohort of globally competent and engaged scientists/engineers that seek career opportunities and collaborators throughout the world. The program consists of a six-week preparatory virtual training series, a 4-day pre-departure symposium at the University of San Diego and a ten-week research program on site at the Science for Life Laboratory in Stockholm, Sweden. The focus of this paper is to examine student attitudes and perspectives during their time abroad through an analysis of blog entries. In Summer 2021, six engineering undergraduates--three women and three men--participated in the inaugural program session. Over the course of the ten-week program, the students completed blog posts in response to four prompts related to their experiences, observations, and challenges. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the student blogs using a hybrid deductive and inductive thematic analysis approach. Our findings span two primary categories: professional and personal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering programs commonly offer students few opportunities to choose their own courses as compared to their non-engineering campus peers. A previous exploratory study found positive correlations between the extent to which engineering degree programs afford students with course choice opportunities (such as free electives, technical electives, etc.) and the percentage of their bachelor's degrees earned by women. The results pointed to the need for additional research to ascertain whether undergraduate engineering programs can attract and graduate more women by providing more customizable degree program options. Similar to engineering, many undergraduate computing programs offer minimal course choice opportunities, thus constraining students in their ability to realize a broad and balanced education. And, a shortage of women is prevalent in undergraduate computing programs. This study delineated the course choice opportunities and balance of required technical and non-technical coursework in 37 computer science and computer engineering programs spanning 25 U.S. News & World Report top-ranked U.S. engineering colleges and looked for correlations between curricular choice, curricular balance and the percentage of bachelor's degrees earned by women. A positive correlation was found between the computing programs' curricular customizability and their percentage of bachelor's degrees earned by women; a positive correlation was also found between the extent to which the computing programs afforded students opportunities for technical--non-technical curricular balance and their percentage of bachelor's degrees earned by women. These preliminary results suggest that providing more flexible, customizable computing program options and/or opportunities to pursue a broad, balanced education may be a means of attracting more women to undergraduate computing programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having choices is linked to both human satisfaction and motivation. A quantitative exploration of curricular choice opportunities across dozens of undergraduate engineering programs yielded evidence of a low-choice culture in engineering education, with engineering students commonly afforded minimal curricular choice and few opportunities to pursue a broad, balanced education compared to their campus peers. Exceptional, highly regarded and accredited engineering programs, while few in number, demonstrated the feasibility of highly flexible, customizable, and balanced programs. Though hypothesized that the low-choice, highly technical engineering curricular model may be a barrier to participation in engineering education, correlations between curricular choice/balance and educational outcomes had not been explored. In this pilot study, curricula and program outcome data were delineated for 21 engineering, math, natural science, and physical science degree programs (nine ABET-accredited, 12 non-accredited) at the University of Colorado Boulder to probe correlations between the amount of course choice and technical--non-technical curricular balance provided by a given program and the program's 1) median time to degree, 2) six-year graduation rate, 3) average GPA, and 4) percentage of bachelor's degrees earned by women. Results were mixed as to the potential benefits of flexible, balanced engineering programs, and numerous confounding factors were present in the study. Cross-institutional research that mitigates confounding factors is needed to further explore correlations between engineering program curricular choice opportunities, balance and educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread need to address both science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and STEM workforce development is persistent. Underscored by the Next Generation Science Standards, demand is high for P-12 engineering-centered curricula. TeachEngineering is a free, standards-aligned NSF-funded digital library of more than 1,500 hands-on, design-rich K- 12 engineering lessons and activities. Beyond anonymous site-user counts, the impact of the TeachEngineering collection and outreach initiatives on the education of children and their teachers was previously unknown. Thus, the project team wrestled with the question of how to meaningfully ascertain classroom impacts of the digital engineering education library and--more broadly--how to ascertain the impacts of teacher-focused P-12 engineering education initiatives. In this paper, the authors approach the classroom impact question through probing self-reported differentials in 1) teachers' confidence in teaching engineering concepts and 2) changes in their teaching practices as a result of exposure to (and experiences with) K-12 engineering education resources and outreach opportunities. In 2016, four quantitative and qualitative surveys were implemented to probe the impact of the TeachEngineering digital library and outreach on four populations of K-12 teachers' confidence and practices, including the frequency with which they integrate engineering into their pre-college classrooms. Survey results document the teacher experience and perception of using hands-on K-12 engineering curricular materials in the classroom and help create a data-driven understanding of where to best invest future resources. The results suggest that the TeachEngineering curricular resources and outreach initiatives help teachers build confidence in their use of engineering curriculum and pedagogy in K-12 classrooms, impact their teaching practices, and increase their likelihood of teaching engineering in the classroom in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational environments that support autonomy have been shown to foster self-motivation, increased engagement, higher-quality learning, and personal well-being--all outcomes that could positively impact access and retention in engineering programs. Increasing course choice opportunities for students seeking an engineering degree could therefore encourage them to meet their innate psychological need for autonomy within the context of an engineering education and possibly benefit educational and program outcomes. This preliminary study explores the extent of curricular choice that undergraduate students encounter in working towards engineering degrees, compared to their non-engineering peers on campus. The course choices that students are given the autonomy to make while earning ABET-accredited engineering degrees in various disciplines are compared to those of students earning degrees in physics, chemistry, math, economics and psychology. "Choice Values" for degree programs at five regionally diverse universities are presented, including both public and private institutions, a large research university, a small liberal arts college and a historically black college & university (HBCU). For the purposes of this study, Choice Value is a quantified representation of the aggregate curricular choice opportunity for a given degree program, and is a function of total course choice opportunities, the proportion of degree credit hours that provide curricular choice, and the number of courses from which students may choose. Choice Values were determined using the published curriculum in the university catalogs, as well as counts for the number of individual course options for each choice opportunity. Choice opportunity examples include menus of course options, technical electives, humanities and social science electives, and free electives. Findings reveal a significant course choice opportunity disparity between engineering and nonengineering students at the five universities studied. The differentially limited curricular choices available to engineering students across all five universities and degree programs included in the study are revealed. Engineering degree program Choice Values were an average of more than 17 times fewer than non-engineering degree program Choice Values, with a median value of 4.7 and a range of 1.8 to 96.1 times lower Choice Values in engineering. Engineering degree programs allocated an average of 4.3% of total degree credit hours to free electives, compared to 19.8% of total degree credit hours for non-engineering degree programs included in the study. The comparatively dismal curricular course opportunities available to students pursuing engineering degrees leads to the question of how degree programs might provide more course choice opportunities, and if doing so might positively impact efforts at broadening participation in engineering enrollments and improve graduation rates. The General Engineering Plus (GE+) degree program, a new (2013) undergraduate degree program in the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) at the University of Colorado Boulder is presented. The GE+ degree program combines interdisciplinary hands-on engineering design plus an engineering emphasis with a student-chosen technical or non-technical concentration, providing students with degrees of curricular choice previously unprecedented in the college's engineering programs, a Choice Value of 405.3 compared to the average Choice Value for CU Boulder's accredited engineering degree programs of 155.7. The GE+ program plans to seek accreditation under ABET's general engineering program criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how a learning community and group identity can be created between engineering students enrolled in an engineering degree program at a large public university. The authors examine the ways in which community is created among the first-year and returning students enrolled in the program.