Supporting Secondary Students’ Engineering Front-End Design Skills with the Mobile Design Studio
Abstract: The front-end of engineering design involves the early stages of the design process where problems are framed, stakeholders and criteria are identified, and initial concepts are generated. These stages are critical to a design project’s success and also dramatically impact the final product, process, or system that is designed. More generally, the front-end of engineering design holds great potential as a problem-solving approach for developing creative solutions to complex problems both within and beyond engineering. However, as this part of the design process is notably open-ended, nonlinear and requires many cycles of iteration, it is difficult to teach and to learn. Undergraduate engineers struggle with front-end design, and it is rarely taught in K-12 settings. In this NSF-funded project we aim to develop a web-based AI-empowered platform and a set of associated design challenges to help middle and high school students learn front-end design skills and thinking.
The platform, called Mobile Design Studio or MODS for short, is driven by three interrelated pedagogical and technological design principles: 1) a focus on having students externalize their thoughts through learning artifacts to facilitate idea development and collaboration; 2) striking a balance between the tension of scaffolding student learning and enabling open-ended problem exploration and 3) leveraging an AI agent, or design mentor, to support students to divergently explore aspects of the problem.
In this presentation, I will first cover some background on the MODS project itself and then address how each of these design principles has affected the development of the platform and design challenges. Following this I will present some preliminary results on how students identify and consider a variety of distinct stakeholders and design concepts from pilot studies with the platform. Finally, I will look to the future and how we plan to continue to develop the platform, particularly the AI design mentor, to more fully support students.
Biography: Corey Schimpf is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He was the Division Chair for the Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) for the American Society of Engineering Education 2024 annual conference. He has a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education. His lab’s major research strands include: (1) analyzing how expertise develops in engineering design across the continuum from novice pre-college students to practicing engineers, (2) advancing engineering design research by integrating new theoretical or analytical frameworks (e.g., from data science or complexity science) (3) understanding how designers connect, empathize with and integrate knowledge and ideas from diverse stakeholders and (4) conducting design-based research to develop scaffolding tools for supporting the learning of complex skills like design.