NSF Ideas Labs: Workforce Development in Engineering

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This project tests and facilitates a creative problem solving methodology designed to produce radically innovative research agendas. This project establishes a natural experiment to examine a process that develops multi-disciplinary research teams in a novel collaborative process that engages researchers in the development of potentially transformative research-based and research-generating ideas. Specifically, the project adapts a participatory action research (PAR) approach to facilitate the development of a problem solving environment and to study this real world problem solving situation in order to: (1) iteratively examine the complex social and intellectual processes involved in collaboration and in creative problem solving and (2) develop novel interdisciplinary research agendas in undergraduate STEM education that address workforce needs unique to Engineering. Thus, the project's impact has potential for serving as a demonstration of the complex process of collaboration in multi-disciplinary research groups, as a test of social and individual processes involved in collaboration and creative problem solving, and as a means for documenting the development of radically innovative research agendas needed to develop the current and future workforce in Engineering.