Work in Progress: Engineering together - Applying remote collaborative technology to an in-person undergraduate engineering course.

This evidence-based Work in Progress research paper will explore how collaborative technology impacts student engagement with teams and programming activities in an introductory first-year engineering course. Introduction to engineering has been a historically difficult course for undergraduates as they are introduced to algorithmic thinking, design processes, and problem-solving methodologies. To assist students, a variety of approaches can be employed in the classroom; teambased capstone projects with end of course demonstrations, synchronous collaborative technology that supports teamwork and communication in and out of class, pair-programming, and visual-based programming languages. Each of these provides benefits to the students individually, but with COVID-19 forcing a shift to remote learning, collaborative technologies experienced an unprecedented development of innovations and tools. A return to in-person classes may incline educators to drop collaborative technologies for teaching, but remote control, screen share, and collaborative tools are still beneficial if using teamwork in the class. This paper investigates the following research question: to what degree is student engagement impacted by the usage of synchronous collaborative tools in a teambased, in-person undergraduate introductory engineering course? An experimental setup was implemented in three different sections of an introductory engineering course at a large, midwestern, R1 institution. All three sections had different instructors and a class size of around 50 students. One of the three sections implemented a technology that allowed students to connect to a teammate's computer and share control of keyboard/mouse, enabling real-time collaborative programming in a normally individual programming environment. The other two sections were control sections with no specific implementation differences. A survey instrument grounded in Burch et al.'s conceptual framework was developed and distributed at strategic times to measure students' engagement with their team and inclass programming tasks. Results presented include a Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) that supports the factor structure of the student engagement survey and an analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedure to compare the three sections and investigate significant differences between them through student grades. The results of this research have potential to provide direction for usage of remote collaborative technology for in-person, academic settings. Future implications of research include investigating the impact of similar technologies on student engagement and learning outcomes; contributing a validated instrument to measure students' engagement with their programming tasks and teams; and provide educators with potential methodologies to improve student engagement in team-based coursework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]