ABSTRACT
In late 2020 the hosts of the IEEE Robot Challenge, a STEaM project requiring close teamwork among high school and middle school students, realized that it would not be able to comply with the COVID-19 restrictions that would likely be in place in early 2021. The project, originally developed by the IEEE Baltimore Section for the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) as part of their Maryland Engineering Challenges program (MEC), would need to be modified significantly, yet it had to maintain a high level of teamwork (now likely to be on-line), and a comparable level of 'challenge' to the earlier in-person version generally held at the BMI. The 3 phases of the Challenge event as well as the robots themselves, would need to be re-designed, and there would be little time for mistakes or rework, as all details of the project would need to perform correctly the first (and possibly only) time they would be used. With the assistance of a group of Systems Engineers, all steps were analyzed and evaluated for their effectiveness and reliability, and on May 25, 2021, the Challenge was held using Zoom as the controlling system. The methodology that we planned to employ was outlined in a paper with this name that was presented at the 2021 ISEC conference [1]. The purpose of this 2022 paper is to measure and evaluate the success of the systems engineering studies and how they could be applied to other projects. Unexpectedly, Covid 19 is still with us, so the Virtual Challenge will again be offered for the April 23, 2022 event, though an 'in-person' Challenge will also be available on another day. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
At the 2019 ISEC conference, a paper was presented [1] that quantitatively described how the IEEE STEaM Robot Challenge project, based on handson teamwork and student interactions, leads students to improved learning engagement, and an increased interest in Engineering. After cancelling the event in 2020 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, it was decided to redesign the project and research whether in the midst of current restrictions, improvements in students' learning engagement could still be obtained even when students would have to work from home and where teamwork could only be practiced on-line. The changes would need to provide a comparable Challenge in each of the four elements of the previous program, and would be validated by a student survey similar to the one conducted for the 2019 paper. Because the project needed to work right the first (and possibly only) time, it was decided to use System Engineering concepts for the re-design, so the project would then become a case study on the use of this technique in an educational setting. The lessons learned from this redesign, and the arrangements developed for the 2021 Robot Challenge competition, may not only be of value for those planning other competitions, but the new on-line system utilized could be readily adapted to reach students living in rural and underserved communities, thus providing them with the same learning experience as those living in metropolitan centers. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Design is recognized as a discipline that is ideally placed to work across boundaries to tackle wicked problems and help cope with uncertainty. As humanity continues to become more interconnected it is thought that we are becoming more exposed to viruses such as COVID-19. Therefore, the current pandemic offers us opportunities to re-think and re-design many of our practices to ensure we are resilient in future similar crises. Through the creation and analysis of a database that captures design interventions that have emerged during the pandemic, the paper considers the role design can play in collectively recovering from the current pandemic and building resilience for the future. Whilst the findings represent the beginning of this process, (from late March until June 2020) we find that design has been deployed in a wide range of ways and on all scales, from the personal, communal, organizational, national and international. However, as we live through and emerge from the pandemic we should reflect, within the realm of design research and beyond, on how we might harness design to enable recovery and build resilience for the future. © 2021 Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos. All rights reserved.