Improving Students' Writing Skills by Integrating Prototyping Activities in their Writing Course

Writing is the most important means of communication in the engineering field. Although understanding the content of an engineering discipline is very important, engineers become much more appreciated if they know how to convey their expertise to a variety of audiences. This paper reports on a collaboration between a writing professor and Engineering Enrichment Program at an international branch campus in the Middle East. Over the course of three semesters, a technical and business writing course was redesigned by integrating prototyping, collaboration, and entrepreneurship skills. Drawing upon survey data, we evaluate the effectiveness of our interdisciplinary, integrated approach to engineering education. From the perspective of writing and communication, students gained a stronger understanding of workplace audiences and expectations. Additionally, the experiential learning focus in the course engaged students in deeper reflective practices in both writing and engineering. We conclude with recommendations for others redesigning courses and curricula for 21 century literacies and global entrepreneurship. We also examine future directions for the course in the coming years. 1.1 Institutional context and the study Texas A&M University at Qatar launched the Engineering Enrichment Program (EEP) in 2014. EEP provides hands-on learning for our engineering students through extra-curricular courses during school breaks, innovative student-led projects, and professional skills training. These courses were originally meant to supplement the engineering curriculum at our institution by allowing students to learn crucial software and hardware programs at their own pace. The long-term vision for the EEP is to add to its current collaborations with faculty, staff, and students through entrepreneurial and technical projects in the curriculum. We chose to start implementing this vision in a Technical and Business Writing course, and this paper reports on the pilot study of implementing prototyping skills into this course. The larger study aims to foster institutional change and provide new knowledge on engineering education and entrepreneurship program development. In this paper, we describe the ‘gaps’ in the curriculum we wanted to fill, the philosophy and assignments in the course, the methods we used to evaluate the course, and future directions for the project. 1.2 Writing and Engineering Previous studies have examined ways to connect writing instruction with the professional development of engineering students, often integrating writing-intensive assignments into required courses for engineering majors [1] [2] [3] [4]. This intervention is often categorized as Writing in the Disciplines (WID), a well-established and evidence-based method for apprenticing students into the writing that will be required of them as professionals in their own particular field. WID programs rely on faculty members, often outside of the English department, to demystify workplace writing practices and discipline-specific conventions of genres. Another model, Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) has shown success in having disciplinary faculty members take ownership of writing instruction in major courses [5]. WID programs often require students to have a fairly significant amount of disciplinary knowledge, so earlier courses in the curriculum tend to use different approaches towards connecting writing and engineering. Some courses incorporate both WID and Writing to Learn (WTL) as philosophies. Whereas WID focuses on disciplinary ways of writing and communicating, WTL uses writing and communication as tools to help students understand course material more effectively. 1.3 Engineering and Writing Collaboration Technical and Business Writing (English 210) at Texas A&M University at Qatar is a required course for all engineering majors, and students often take it in their second year, meaning that WTL assignments are needed to scaffold students’ understanding of disciplinary forms of writing. English 210 is taught by faculty members with expertise in rhetoric and composition, technical and workplace communication, and English as a Second Language. None have previous experience as engineering practitioners, so effective WID assignments require collaboration with industry partners or interested and available engineering faculty members. For their part, English 210 instructors at Texas A&M University at Qatar experienced problems helping students and faculty members understand the variety of genres required of engineers. Prior to entering the course, most students’ experience with writing in engineering courses was lab reports, written only for the professor and only for evaluation of students’ performance in the lab. While these assignments fulfilled the engineering professors’ purposes of assessing student learning, they did not adequately prepare students for non-academic audiences. English 210 instructors were therefore tasked with introducing students to workplace communication for a profession they had little experience with. Thus, one of the problems we wanted to solve with our collaboration was to develop problembased assignments for an industry audience within this writing course [6]. In addition to making the English course more relevant and rigorous for students, adding engineering design and prototyping projects to a course for secondand third-year students provided scaffolding for their capstone experience. As we describe in the next section, students received instruction and practice on writing and working productively in teams. By receiving feedback from both experts and nonexperts, students also gained knowledge on writing for different audiences. This course and our collaboration have aimed to foster larger changes at our international branch campus. The current curriculum is robust but largely traditional: no courses on entrepreneurship or design thinking are offered at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Some would say there is good reason to exclude entrepreneurship from the Texas A&M University at Qatar engineering curriculum, as the ecosystem for startups is just beginning to emerge in Qatar and has just started to take a foothold in the Middle East – North Africa region. However, for the Engineering Enrichment Program director, this is the right time to add entrepreneurship and design thinking as extracurricular short courses to the program, or even to collaborate with course instructors on integrating these topics in their courses. Moreover, the program is currently expanding its collaboration to include many business incubators in Qatar, to be better aligned with institutional strategic initiative in teaching and learning excellence, and to be consistent with the mission and interest of Qatar National Vision 2030. Rapid prototyping is the means by which entrepreneurs can quickly develop and realize their ideas into a product. Rapid prototyping is becoming a necessity to communicate the concept and technical features to potential investors and customers. In the Engineering Enrichment Program, students from multiple engineering disciplines are trained with all skills required to build a prototype within a remarkably short period of time; these skills include but are not limited to 3D modelling, laser cutting and 3D printing. For the writing professor, the larger change she wanted to see was for students and faculty to make connections between writing and design. For both engineers and writers, the iterative practices of design are crucial to their success [7]. Both prototypes and the written communication that accompanies them are constantly evaluated and improved through feedback loops. However, popular perception suggests that “good” designs just appear in the inventor’s head, just as people might believe the myth that “good” writing appears magically in a student’s paper. In order to apprentice students into their discipline, designers and writers often have to combat these influential narratives about how they work. This collaboration gave students the opportunity to reflect on “what really happened” when they worked as engineers to negotiate as a team, develop a prototype, and communicate their design ideas to others. The next section describes the course in more detail. 2.1 Description of the course Over the course of four semesters, the pilot version of English 210 underwent a number of changes. The main structure remained the same: a semester-long project asking students to develop a prototype in an area of engineering design and present that prototype at a showcase at the end of the semester. The first semester, students were allowed to design for any engineering subdiscipline; the second semester had “Smart Cities” as its theme. In the third iteration of the course, students designed prototypes for the Challenge 22 competition in Qatar, and the most recent version of the course required students to innovate in the healthcare sector. In each of these iterations, three main areas of knowledge were addressed and assessed. 2.1.1 Collaboration skills Early in the semester, students chose teams that were required to be diverse in terms of major, gender, and/or nationality. Teams consisted of 3-5 students who often formed because of shared interest in one of the ideas a member had put forward as a possible direction for their project. Teams were required to draft and revise a team contract and a Gantt chart, as well as return to these documents throughout the semester for updates and reflection. In-class activities focused on constructive and destructive conflict, conflict resolution, different models of collaboration on writing assignments, and diverse communication styles. Students read a textbook on team writing and completed activities related to the topics in that textbook [8]. Although not a significant part of the original design of the pilot course, teamwork arose as an important area for instruction and practice. Collabo