No abstract

Whether for 21st century skills development such as creativity, communication, and collaboration orfor transdisciplinary knowledge creation leading to innovation, the integration of Arts with STEM (Science,Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields is gaining popularity in higher education. However, a comprehensive survey of proven methodologies to integrate Arts with STEM disciplines (referred to as STEAM) currently does not exist. This paper presents the preliminary results of asystematized literature review done to characterize the integration of arts with STEM disciplines in higher education. It also uses these findings to analyze the most recent STEAM initiative of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa. This research finds three main rationales to integrate arts with STEM and presents the frameworks discussed in the literature to do this integration. It also examines how creativity is assessed and developed within STEAM higher education contexts. This research contributes a reference of validated arts integration and creativity frameworks which can be used to setup STEAM projects or evaluate them in relation to proven methodologies. The frameworks presented in this research can be used in classrooms and professional environments.

Creativity, communication skills, interdisciplinary sensitivity, and cultural and civic responsibility are vital skills and perspectives to inculcate in contemporary engineering students. A number of studies have demonstrated the benefits of exposing engineering students to arts, as studying arts and humanities can open up their minds to creative ideas from great minds outside of science and engineering. In most cases, engineering students are exposed to the arts by taking a few non-technical courses as electives. Many students view these courses as less important and irrelevant to their field of studies. Integrating the arts into the technical engineering curriculum is challenging but critical to engineering design, particularly in early years, and represents a natural opportunity. This paper discusses the approach taken by the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa of exposing students to the arts through curricular and extra-curricular design activities. These include offering design challenges, a first-year engineering design course and summer internships. This paper also discusses the challenges that arise in delivering such curriculum and the impact of such exposure on the engineering students involved.

Engineering design courses often include a team-based project. Project-based learning offers a great opportunity for engineering students to learn about teamwork and collaboration. It also gives students a chance to learn about themselves and improve their conflict management skills. Choosing the right team members for a specific project is not trivial, as the choice of the team often affects the project outcome and the students’ experience in the course. Moreover, there is a debate among engineering educators as to whether it is better to force team composition or not. In this paper, we investigate the impact of team composition and formation on project outcomes and student satisfaction in a second-year engineering design course at the University of Ottawa. The course is open to all engineering students and has an accessibility theme. Students work in teams with a client that has a specific accessibility need. Students meet the client three times during the semester and deliver a physical prototype by the end of the semester. For this study, students in the design course were divided into two groups. Students in the first group were allowed to pick their teams, while the instructor created the teams in the second group based on multidisciplinary composition and year of study. Both groups had the same instructor and the same course material, labs, project choices, etc. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a few teams in each group.

The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa is home to multiple rapid prototyping facilities and entrepreneurship spaces. These include a makerspace, a machine shop and a design space for any student to use free of charge. First- and second-year students also take courses in the Makerlab, a sister facility to the Makerspace, that introduces them to collaborative project-based learning, engineering problem-solving and prototyping in a cornerstone design course. Each three-hour weekly lab has a teaching assistant (TA), typically a graduate student, and a project manager (PM), typically an undergraduate student who has taken the course previously. They are responsible for teaching the lab content and guiding the students through their design process. Since design courses are weighted heavily toward projects and labs, this evidence-based practice paper is part of a study that has the goal of understanding, via student evaluations, the impact of TA and PM training on their performance. This paper presents an analysis of the impact of TA and PM training, based on the students’ evaluation of their TA’s and PM’s performance. Factors considered were the amount of training received by the TAs and PMs, the type of training and the satisfaction of the students. The students were surveyed to gauge their satisfaction with the quality of their TAs and PMs, and the survey results were compared with a number of outcomes.