This study explores students' initial engagement with ill-structured problems before and after the introduction of engineering problem typology as a framework for problem engagement and reflection. Using problem discussions, debrief interviews, and qualitative analysis of written artifacts, we considered observed changes to students' initial…

Background: Collaboration--including coordination, communication, and teamwork--is crucial to engineering practice. However, engineering students are often perceived as lacking key collaboration skills at the time of graduation. Purpose: We used structuration theory to explore how differences between students and practitioners' collaboration…

This study explores how undergraduate engineering students interacted with users, user proxies, and user information during engineering design curricular experiences at a Large Midwestern University. Such practices are essential to human-centered design, a prominent framework within engineering design curriculums. While human-centered design can…

In design-oriented biomedical engineering courses, some instructors teach need-driven methods for health technology innovation that use a "need statement" to reflect a student team's hypothesis about the most fruitful direction for their project. While need statements are of the utmost importance to the projects, we were not aware of any…

Problem- and project-based learning (PBL) is often highlighted as a valuable approach for addressing the need for interdisciplinarity in engineering education. However, studies indicate that applied projects in engineering education tend to be limited to a single discipline. This article presents a new project typology which can be applied in…

Contribution: This article describes efforts to improve the teaching and learning process for the digital system design course using active learning (AL) approaches in the classroom and a parallel hands-on project designed based on constructive alignment (CA). Background: The digital systems design course is an important part of Undergraduate…

System-based learning (SBL) in engineering domains integrates systems thinking and engineering principles to develop a system. In software engineering, to develop software using the DevOps process, using SBL environment, students gain a comprehensive understanding of the DevOps software development process and apply theoretical concepts to…

While project-based learning purportedly values student agency, supporting and managing this remains challenging. We conducted a design-based research study to understand how problem authenticity, and task and participant structures can contribute to students' framing agency, in which students make decisions that are consequential to their…

Contribution: The proposed operational model offers a detailed framework for understanding the complexities of design thinking. It helps instructors evaluate each stage, promoting the development of high-quality designs. This model emphasizes the link between the various stages and the final design quality, steering students toward achieving…

Contribution: The study characterizes aspects of cognitive and metacognitive dimensions of team cognition of software development teams in educational settings. Background: The software development industry requires software engineers and developers to work in teams; for this, there is substantial research on teamwork in the context of the…

This pedagogical study aimed to demonstrate an updated Building Information Modelling (BIM) educational activity in CEM (i.e., construction engineering and management) students' final semester project. It investigated students' perceptions of BIM and the project. Student feedback provided insights for linking education to practice, for example,…

Background: Engineering education traditionally emphasizes technical skills, sometimes at the cost of under-preparing graduates for the real-world engineering context. In recent decades, attempts to address this issue include increasing project-based assignments and engineering design courses in curricula; however, a skills gap between education…

Project-based learning (PBL) is a learning technology praised for its ability to grow domain-specific and domain-general skills and related knowledge and attitudes. However, consistently designing effective PBL experiences is challenging, primarily due to the lack of instructor support and guidance for designing PBL experiences aligned with…

Purpose: This research aims to assess and compare project-based learning (PBL) designs to deliver technopreneur in higher education, as a case student of the Industrial Engineering Department. So, it can facilitate students who play a role in facilitating the process of technological transformation so the student knows well how to solve the…

Background: Although open-ended projects are common in the first and final years of US engineering programs, middle-year courses tend to utilize simpler highly constrained problems. Such problems can elicit knowledge and social practices typical of school activity ("School World"), with limited applicability in real engineering work…