“Everything sucked... for everyone”: Narrative of a Student Journeying Through Engineering Before COVID-19, During COVID-19, and Beyond

This paper reports on the final year of the project, CAREER: Actualizing Latent Diversity: Building Innovation through Engineering Students' Identity Development (NSF EEC 1554057). Engineering has a history of attracting and graduating look-a-like and think-a-like engineers. Those who look or think like a “stereotypical engineer” may feel more welcome in engineering and may be why engineering has attracted and graduated similar students. This research project considered the unique ways of being, thinking, and knowing-what we call latent diversity-that can be highlighted and valued. Students' latent diversity may or may not align with the values in engineering education that focus on a social/technical dualism, meritocracy, and rigor, which are built-in Whiteness and masculinity. Students, particularly minoritized students (i.e., women, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students), may feel pushed out of engineering or they may feel the need to conform to these values to fit in. These messages create an engineering education that limits who can be an engineer as well as how these engineers are prepared to solve complex engineering problems. In this paper, we use an example of one student, John, and how he navigated his experiences through engineering over four years. We discuss how key themes of mental health and neurodiversity intersect with his identity development as an engineer over time as well as overlap and were complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We use this rich, single case as an example of how the mixed methods research in this study provides a nuanced understanding of students' trajectories in engineering. We also discuss the implications of this work for inclusive teaching and provide connections to existing resources and tools developed from the research project. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022

Teaching complex skills through an online robotics competition during Covid-19 pandemic

As the hands-on engineering education got severely affected by the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the present study discusses how to adopt the Project-Based Learning (PBL) approach to teach complex engineering concepts in this tough time. In this paper, we have discussed the design of a gamified problem statement (using a robotic simulation environment called CoppeliaSim) which was used to teach complex engineering concepts like image processing, control systems, path planning, etc to undergraduate students by a pioneering initiative in engineering education. The study was implemented on 469 teams (1876 students) and explores how the use of a simulation environment impacts the overall performance of teams in completing the assigned problem statement. In addition to this, we have demonstrated the use of a leaderboard to increase learner engagement and motivation in completing the problem statement. Our work is useful to anyone seeking to use PBL to teach and/or learn complex engineering concepts. © 2022 IEEE.

Effective Implementation of Complex Engineering Problems and Complex Engineering Activities in Malaysian Engineering Curricular

The Engineering Accreditation Council Standard 2020 requires the stipulated 12 programme outcomes that address complex engineering problems (CEP) and complex engineering activities (CEA) to be incorporated in the engineering programmes. However, the implementation of outcome-based education with regards to CEP and CEA is still in the infancy stage. This study was carried out to give an overview of the implementation of complex engineering problems and activities in Malaysian engineering programmes in relation to the types of assessment used to address CEP and CEA, and the typical weightage and taxonomy level of CEP and CEA employed in these assessments. A survey questionnaire was administered to 256 engineering educators from 25 universities to enquire about the implementation of CEP and CEA in their engineering programmes, particularly in the online teaching and learning during the Covid19 pandemic. The findings showed that most of the programmes addressed complex engineering problems in assignments or projects as compared to final examinations or mid-term tests. Complex engineering activities were found to be addressed in Final Year Project, Industrial Training and Integrated Design Project and laboratory courses. The findings in this study could act as a guideline for educators to enhance the teaching and learning activities incorporating CEP and CEA elements, and hence facilitating the continual quality improvement for an engineering programme. © 2021