Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Facilitating Design Thinking through Cases

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The goal of the proposed project is to use case studies to introduce design thinking to first-generation and underrepresented students to help them transition from classroom and lab-based learning to engineering capstone design and ultimately to their careers in engineering fields. The case studies will be implemented as part of a new discussion section for a Mechanical Engineering class at UC Merced, a Hispanic Serving Institution where over 60% of undergraduates are the first in their families to attend college, more than half come from bilingual or non-English-speaking homes, and more than 75% of students receive financial aid. This project also represents the first collaboration between an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at UC Merced who teaches design and is familiar with the challenges students face but has no formal training in education, and an associate professor in Educational Psychology at Michigan State University with expertise in case studies and engineering education. The project will have direct impact on the students at UC Merced who participate in the pilot program, longer-term and wider-reaching impact through dissemination of the case studies and evaluation of their success, as well as on the PIs who will learn from each other's expertise and use this as the first step towards future collaborative education innovation. The engineering profession is a complex and ill-structured domain, and it is recognized that the skill sets which will be required for engineers to successfully fulfill the mission of their profession are much broader than those honed in traditional engineering curricula. This is the premise for promoting and cultivating design thinking in engineering students, and is the focus of the proposed research, which leverages the experiential contexts to develop desired attributes of future engineers. Specifically, this project is based the hypothesis that engaging students in a case-based class before the capstone design course will enable them to both perform better in the design class and will prepare them for real world engineering. This hypothesis will be explored by integrating the component-specific instruction of lectures from an existing Mechanical Component Design course into case studies, with the goal of introducing the students to design thinking. More specifically, design thinking will be taught using case studies that involve the five phases of the Stanford design process: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Given the complex cognitive nature of design thinking, this structured approach will allow students to generate and evolve their solutions/ideas while helping them navigate the challenges of design thinking. The main objectives of this project are to: (1) Develop the PI's expertise in embedding case studies to teach design thinking, (2) establish a library of case studies that use design thinking to expand engineering students' view of problem formulation and solution development, and (3) evaluate the effectiveness of case-based instruction for instilling design thinking behavior in a diverse student population.