The Energy Conversion Playground (ECP) Design Task: Assessing how Students Think About Technical and Non-Technical Considerations in Sustainable Community Development

Abstract

-Students in global service-learning and similar programs frequently encounter substantial social, cultural, political, and ethical differences when working with project partners in different countries and regions. Neglecting such differences can lead to project failures and/or disempowered communities. In response to these challenges, educational resources have been developed to teach students to think about how the people, social structures, and other contextual factors associated with projects can affect, and be affected by, students' designs. Yet, there remains a scarcity of valid and reliable instruments to evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions. The purpose of this study is create a theoretically and empirically grounded instrument, the Energy Conversion Playground (ECP) design task, that is able to provide a meaningful and robust assessment of an individual's ability to identify salient technical and non-technical considerations when approaching an engineering design task situated in a developing country context. We present the scenario and an accompanying rubric that was first developed inductively from student responses to the scenario (specifically 449 discrete items from 93 ECP design tasks submitted by students who attended a Global Engineering Design Symposium). Further development of the rubric involved deductive grounding in relevant literature. To demonstrate the sensitivity of ECP design task to changes in students' thinking, we also performed comparative analysis of responses from a subset of the students (n=37) who completed the same instrument both before and after participating in the GEDS.

Socio‐technical thinking of students and practitioners in the context of humanitarian engineering

“…Moreover, engineering work requires a focus on “ethical considerations associated with the design, the stakeholders' sociocultural context, or how the design interacts with the natural environment” (Mazzurco et al, , p. 70). Such considerations are strongly related to contextual listening, for which “information such as cost, weight, technical specs, desirable functions, and timeline acquires meaning only when the context of the person(s) making the requirements (their history, political agendas, desires, forms of knowledge, etc.)…”

“…We took a scenario-based assessment approach similar to that used in other studies to answer this question (e.g., Adams, Beltz, Mann, & Wilson, 2010;Atman et al, 2007;Fila, Hess, Purzer, & Dringenberg, 2016;Kilgore, Atman, Yasuhara, Barker, & Morozov, 2007;McKenna, 2007;McKenna, Hynes, Johnson, & Carberry, 2016). Specifically, we distributed the Energy Conversion Playground (ECP) design task, an open-ended scenario-based instrument (Mazzurco, Huff, & Jesiek, 2014), to both experienced practitioners and students starting their engineering degree, and we compared their responses. In the remainder of the article, we review relevant literature on socio-technical thinking and scenariobased assessment.…”

Enhancing Transdisciplinary Learning through Community-Based Design Projects: Results from a Mixed Methods Study

“…Pre/post interviews were conducted with all six participants; however, one high-performing female did not participate in her post-course interview, and thus her results are not represented in the final analysis. The raw data from the interviews was thematically analyzed for considerations included in the design process with a 90% agreement in inter-rater reliability using Cohen's kappa, and then recoded using a rubric adapted from Mazzurco, Huff, and Jesiek, 119 which includes four categories of considerations: stakeholder considerations, technical considerations, non-technical constraints, and broader considerations ( Figure 3). …”

Humanizing Signals and Systems: A Reflective Account

“…But as demonstrated in the quote, I felt that I had hijacked the discussion by dominating the conversation. When the students did speak, however, they showed enthusiasm in what they thought was a brilliant helping strategy, seemingly blind to the potential marginalization to children or other communities, which was imbued in this scenario (see Mazzurco et al 33 for more details on this exercise).…”

“…Following the procedures laid out by Mazzurco, et al 33 , three students in my research group and I randomized and rated the stated considerations from two iterations of the ECP design task. The four categories that the authors describe are technical (T), non-technical constraints (C), stakeholder considerations (S), broader considerations about cultural ecosystems (BC).…”