Investigating Secondary Students’ Engagement with Web-based Engineering Design Processes

The National Academy of Engineering suggests that K-12 engineering education should focus on the process of engineering design. Similarly, the Next Generation Science Standards incorporate engineering design processes alongside scientific inquiry in K-12 settings . Using engineering design as a medium through which to learn related STEM content has shown promise yet it may be difficult for precollege instructors to incorporate into their practice because many K-12 teachers and students lack explicit exposure to engineering design. Students who do engage in engineering projects often rely on trial-and-error approaches that may or may not connect to deeper conceptual understanding, or focus heavily on building structures without engaging in other design processes. Modeling engineering design explicitly can help students develop design fundamentals, much like the principles of cognitive apprenticeship or explicit models of inquiry . WISEngineering is an online learning environment that scaffolds engineering design for precollege students with demonstrated learning outcomes. Instructional modules within WISEngineering guide students through hands-on design projects. In addition to providing students with opportunities to engage with CAD and digital fabrication technologies, projects within WISEngineering are structured to correspond with authentic engineering design processes (i.e. iteration, generating multiple solutions, prototyping, etc.) using an informed engineering design pedagogy. This study investigates what kinds of engineering design processes middle school students engage in with WISEngineering. Although projects in WISEngineering suggest a sequence of steps to complete design projects, students can navigate freely within the environment. Using log data from students engaged in a Community Garden design project, we will investigate how scaffolding informed engineering design can help students become involved in engineering design processes. Classroom observations combined with the analysis of system log file data to explore the time devoted to various engineering design processes will help us answer the following research questions: 1. How can scaffolding engineering design processes through WISEngineering help middle school students engage in authentic engineering practices? 2. What types of patterns in design processes do students exhibit? Results from this study will inform other precollege engineering educators about how to support design projects in authentic classrooms as well as illustrate common design patterns for middle school students.