Social Consciousness in Engineering Students: An Analysis of Freshmen Design Project Abstracts

This research paper explores the motivations behind freshmen engineering projects, particularly as they vary by gender composition of the team. All freshmen in the engineering program at Louisiana Tech University must take and pass Engineering Problem Solving III, an engineering design class, before moving on to sophomore engineering classes. Students are instructed to team up in groups of two to five to design and construct a “smart product” using the knowledge gained from their previous Engineering Problem Solving I and II classes. At the end of the quarter, each team must submit a project abstract before presenting their work at the Freshmen Design Expo. This qualitative study looks at these abstracts in an attempt to find a pattern between the gender composition of the group and the motivation behind the product. Eighty-one project abstracts are analyzed, representing 227 students. Several distinct themes emerged from the analysis of the project abstracts. The most common themes were Annoying and Frustrating, Efficiency and Time Saving, Safety, Elderly and Disabled, Health and Sanitation, Forgetfulness, and Children. Analysis of how these themes map to gender composition of design teams is ongoing. These themes will help to understand how students view the impact that they can have as future engineers. Redesigning curricula and analyzing recruitment techniques to encompass particular themes may help to attract and retain more students in engineering. In this study, groups that had an equal number of males and females were more likely to design a socially conscious project than groups that were mostly male or mostly female. Introduction Freshmen engineering students at Louisiana Tech University take a series of three engineering problem solving courses as part of the Living with the Lab experience [1]. The third course culminates in an open-ended design project. Students spend about five weeks selecting, designing, and building a “smart” product. Throughout the first year, these students have implemented a variety of sensors and actuators using an Arduino microcontroller. Their smart product must sense something about its environment and respond or report based on this input. Students self-select their teams of two to five members (honors sections typically use teams of two). They are guided through brainstorming, production of multiple prototypes, and discussions with instructors and fellow classmates. Their final product is presented to a panel of judges at the Freshmen Design Expo. Before the Expo, student teams are required to submit a brief project description that is distributed to judges and guests. These descriptions are analyzed in this study to identify underlying motivations. Students are not given strict guidelines on the intended consumer or intended use of the project so the students come up with a wide variety of ideas ranging from Lucky Charm sorters for picky eaters to clean water filtration systems for third world countries. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the gender composition of each team and the motivation behind their project, in particular, the presence or absence of social consciousness. Social consciousness Social consciousness is an important part of life because it is what motivates us to perform services and supply goods to others. Social consciousness is paramount in engineering because it allows for various perspectives to universal issues. Social responsibility is the desire to do something to meet societal needs. Vanzdoort discusses the micro levels of social responsibility such as ethical codes for engineers and macro levels of social responsibility such as societal decisions about technology. He states that knowledge of the social aspects of engineering is necessary because of the environment in which engineers work [1]. Research also suggests that there is a need for global competence in the engineering profession. Lohmann, Rollins, and Hoey researched the importance of learning about cultures and issues worldwide [2]. Their study concluded that international study is key to becoming a successful global engineer. Though technical skills are necessary, they are not sufficient. To obtain ABET accreditation programs must ensure that students have the technical skills as well as the ability to demonstrate social responsibility. ABET requires that students in the program have “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” [3]. To effectively make an impact as an engineer, one must know where societal issues lie. Social consciousness has been a concern for engineering educators for some time now. One study showed that many engineers lack knowledge of social needs and trends [4]. Research has shown that social consciousness in engineering is especially important to female students because the ability to help society is a common reason that females choose engineering [5]. It has also been revealed that females are more likely than males to sacrifice salary in order to serve society [5], [6]. However, Matusovich found that more women than men felt that engineering values did not align with their sense of self. [7]. For this reason, engineering concentrations with more obvious societal benefit, such as environmental and biomedical engineering, attract more female students [8]. Previous research shows that first year engineering students typically describe social responsibility using phrases such as giving back, helping individuals, and ethical behavior [9]. In this paper we define social consciousness as the recognition of societal needs. As stated in the Engineer’s Creed, engineers should strive to “... place service before profit, the honor and standing of the profession before personal advantage, and the public welfare above all other considerations”[10] . Methods As women are socialized to be more nurturing and compassionate than men [5][11], the initial hypothesis was that groups that were predominantly female would focus more on helping others while the groups that contained more males would develop projects that would be primarily designed with college students in mind. Sample The sample for this study consists of 227 freshman engineering students at Louisiana Tech University enrolled in Engineering Problem Solving III in the spring of 2015. According to academic records, males make up 79 percent of this sample, leaving 21 percent females. The average team size was 2.2 in the five honors sections and 3.7 in the four regular sections. Data collection To generate project ideas, students are asked to create a "bug list" following the IDEO design process described in The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley [12]. Each student records a new bug for the first seven homework assignments; the problem statement for homework 1 is provided below: Generate bug #1 for your “Bug List.” Remember that a bug can be something that doesn’t work quite right or that could be improved, something that bothers you, or things that you notice others struggling with. For your homework, please name the bug, write up at least a two sentence description of the bug, and provide pictures when it makes sense to do so. You don’t need to try to find a solution to the problem at this point. Try to think of bugs in different categories as you build your bug list. For example, find bugs related to major life activities (recreational, occupational, tasks of daily living, transportation, communication, learning) and bugs affecting special people groups (disabled, senior adults, children). For homework 8, student teams compile their bugs to create a team list; the problem statement for homework 8 is provided below: Meet with the other members in your group, and compile a single bug list for your group. Include ALL seven of each group member’s bugs. As a group, select the bug you “think” you would like to tackle for your design project, and identify this bug in your homework. As an example, a team of three students would combine 7 bugs from each team member into a master list of 21 bugs as a team, and then decide which of these 21 bugs (or a variant thereof) they will tackle as their design project. Each team was instructed to write an abstract that would give an overview of the product. Our data is a result of the analysis of these abstracts. Abstract analysis The purpose of the abstract analysis was to identify relationships between the gender composition of the teams and the motivation behind the products they invented. To determine the themes in the data we first read all the abstracts that were submitted. A spreadsheet was used to organize the information collected from the abstracts. While reading each abstract, keywords were chosen based on the products intended purpose and consumer. We then noted the keywords and phrases that occurred most often. Then these words were grouped based on their resemblance to one another. For example, safety, safe, cautious, prevention and protection were grouped together and the abstracts that were included in this group were included in the Safety theme. These themes gave us more insight into the motivations behind each group’s product. Emergent themes were Annoying and Frustrating, Efficiency and Time Saving, Safety, Elderly and Disabled, Health and Sanitation, Forgetfulness, and Children.analysis The purpose of the abstract analysis was to identify relationships between the gender composition of the teams and the motivation behind the products they invented. To determine the themes in the data we first read all the abstracts that were submitted. A spreadsheet was used to organize the information collected from the abstracts. While reading each abstract, keywords were chosen based on the products intended purpose and consumer. We then noted the keywords and phrases that occurred most often. Then these words were grouped based on their resemblance to one a