Making the Makers: Building Hands-on Skills to Help Humanity Through First-Year Design

This complete evidence-based practice paper examines structure and student feedback of a pilot offering of “Engineering Design & Society”, a new hands-on first-year course teaching humancentered design to inspire engineering students to become innovators to help humanity. Students are actively engaged in practicing the human-centered design and prototyping process while learning makerspace and hands-on skills (solid modeling, 3D printing, programming, microelectronics, sensors, actuators, basic hand & power tools). Students then practice and incorporate these skills in a multidisciplinary team to research, design, build, document, and present on their functional prototype of a solution to help humanity to meet specific needs. The course is centered on experiential learning for all first-year engineering students through handson education in a classroom structured as a makerspace. Students collaborate at worktables in teams, each team with their own tools, with a dedicated class suite of 3D printers and other maker tools to help students not only design, but also physically build and program functional prototypes. The goals and benefits of the Engineering Design & Society course are to: 1) Promote a culture of making in first-year students through early introduction of solid modeling, programming, sensors, data acquisition, 3D printing, and other maker tools; 2) Help students learn techniques to solve open-ended engineering challenges; 3) Build student self-confidence in their individual making skills (especially for female and minority engineering students) to increase student hands-on participation in engineering societies, innovation challenges, and internships, and 4) Build teamwork and cooperative learning skills through participation in multidisciplinary teams. This complete evidence-based work outlines the curriculum characteristics of this first-year course. Impact on students is examined both quantitative and qualitatively through student selfreported surveys from the pilot sections of the course. Survey data examines student perceptions on how the structure and content of the course impact student identity as makers and their selfconfidence in making skills. Student self-reported data on gender, ethnic background, major, prior programming experience, and prior building experience are included to examine makercentered impact across a diverse background of first-year engineering students. Course Development The study of this work focuses on the course development and course structure based on the integration of a number of successful curriculum characteristics from other researchers into a single-semester active learning course to introduce a first-year human-centered multidisciplinary design course at a large university where no prior similar experience existed. Figure 1 outlines the four categories which were examined in the development of the structure of the course, 1) Maker Skills & Maker Space, 2) Educational Content & Course Structure, 3) Human-Centered Design & Societal Needs, and 4) the integration of 1-3 for course Deliverables & Outcomes to support student success in the larger engineering curriculum. Figure 1: Curriculum components and structure of Engineering Design & Society course. 1) Maker Skills & Maker Space: A makerspace classroom used for the pilot offering in the course is described in [1], it is a room with seating for 20 students with workspace tables for teams of 4 students. The makerspace setting for this class was chosen based on existing research that suggests that these type of settings facilitate student collaboration, communication, design thinking, and creativity. The setting for our class is similar to other existing makerspaces since it includes rapid prototyping tools, low-cost microcontroller components, and several online resources that are common within the makerspace education community [3,4]. For instance, each student team has a rolling tool cart at their table with a number of hand and power tools utilized in prototyping. Students are shown how to safely handle all tools needed for the course, and are encouraged to freely get up and use the tools as needed. The makerspace is structured as an active learning classroom, there is no front or lecture area in the room. All lecture materials are delivered online, and live course time in the makerspace is utilized for active learning and practicing the design & prototyping process. The makerspace is equipped with 3D printers for students to individually learn and use as tools for prototyping. The 3D printers used are Lulzbot TAZ6 models, which were selected by utilizing 3rd year engineering undergraduates to test a variety of PLA based printers to select the model they felt first year students would have the easiest time operating independently. The application of 3D printing across a variety of engineering majors is covered as part of the course curriculum. Students use online tutorials to individually learn solid modeling software. Onshape was selected for the pilot course based on the combination of the software being free for students, exporting files well for 3D printer use, ease of online team collaboration, ease of linking solid modeling files into documents for faculty grading, and being a web based software, so there is no software installation required and it runs the same across various computer types. The course textbook is an Arduino Starter Kit which includes a 170 page book that documents microelectronics, engineering sensors & actuators, and the coding process through a series of 12 well documented microelectronic builds. Each student individually owns the kit and learns to program the use of a variety of engineering sensors & actuators that have applications across most engineering majors. The Arduino platform was chosen to build individual maker skills using a commonly used hardware in the maker community with a large online repository of open source physical builds & associated code for first-year students to continue making even after the course is over. Arduino electronics are used in some of the second and third year engineering courses at the University of Florida so introduction during first year also benefits those students taking any of the subsequent courses. 2) Educational Content & Course Structure: The format of the course was based on balancing student credit hours and makerspace resources. The University of Florida has an estimated enrollment of 1,600 new engineering students each year. The steady-state goal is to structure the Engineering Design & Society course where all first-year students take the course, so optimization of credit hours and space utilization had to be balanced. To make minimal impact on student credit hours, the course was designed as a one semester, 2 credit hour course. This allows first-year students to take the course in the fall, spring, or summer terms. Fitting that quantity of students into a makerspace and having a meaningful experience resulted in the structure of a 2 hour live meeting once per week for a maximum of 49 students per section. This will result in approximately 33 sections; 14 in the fall, 14 in the spring, and 5 in the summer. A dedicated makerspace classroom and 3D printer room for the Engineering Design & Society course is part of a building currently under construction with an opening date within the next year. To limit the in-makerspace time to 2 laboratory hours, 1 credit hour of online course content is delivered in module videos through the university course management system. These modules cover topics such as human-centered design, tutorials on solid modeling, 3D printing techniques, Arduino build tutorials, engineering memos, engineering design reports, teamwork, elevator pitches, etc. Students are assigned video modules to cover before they attend makerspace class each week [1]. This flipped format, with lectures online, and live time reserved for hands-on activities optimizes makerspace resources, and allows students to engage with faculty and peer mentors during the live active learning sessions. Undergraduate peer mentors, junior and senior students from a variety of majors, are utilized for both in-class help alongside an engineering faculty member and for open build time (currently all day Fridays), where individual students or student teams can come into the makerspace for peer assisted help with any aspect of their projects. 3) Human-Centered Design & Societal Needs: Utilizing human-centered design for societal needs was chosen to engage first-year students through the impact engineering can make to help society. The goal was to engage and excite students by bringing them into being part of the solution for designing and prototyping for the purpose of helping humanity. The 7-step humancentered design process shown in Figure 2 was created for the Engineering Design & Society course [1] to support both integration of human centered design and cover the full curriculum and deliverables of the class. Figure 2: The 7-step human-centered design process documented in [1], developed based on human-centered design practices [5] and balancing the needs and resources of this course. Students begin practicing the human-centered design process from the first day of class to establish the mindset that engineers have the abilities to solve problems in the world through their skills and human-centered design. As the semester progresses, assignments and inmakerspace activities increase in complexity along both the “Understanding of the Users” and the “Design Process and Integration” axes of experiential learning [2]. The characteristics balanced in the final group projects for the course include being: a human-centered design topic that students can research and document the impact on society, multidisciplinary in nature, representable by a physical prototype that can fit within a desktop workspace, and a functional prototype that can be desig