Engaging, Educating, and Assessing Undergraduate Engineers

July 1, 2013

Some first-year engineering students at UW-Madison this fall will participate in a virtual internship to learn about biomedical engineering. New research suggests that participating in a virtual internship increases students’ interest in engineering and their desire to pursue an engineering degree. This effect is especially pronounced among women.

Using the computer simulation, students become interns at the fictitious company Nephrotex. Their task is to design a nanotechnology-based membrane for use in hemodialysis machines. These machines filter the blood of patients with kidney disorders. Students work both individually and in small project teams. A faculty member or teaching assistant guides them via in-game e-mail and chat.

The virtual environment prompts students to learn more about the company’s mission, vision, and history. After students design, build, and test prototypes, they select the one they think will best satisfy the company stakeholders, who have conflicting expectations and values. Complex problem solving is required of the students, as it is not possible to create a device that satisfies all of the stakeholders’ demands. Each student must individually justify his or her design selection and explain why it meets the criteria of certain stakeholders and not others.

This fall, the UW-Madison College of Engineering will offer for the first time a course entirely based on digital learning simulations. First-year students will participate in two virtual internships—including Nephrotex—and propose solutions to realistic engineering design problems. New research suggests that participating in such simulations increases women's interest in engineering and desire to pursue an engineering degree. The virtual internships were developed by WCER's Epistemic Games Group in collaboration with faculty and students from the College of Engineering. The Epistemic Games Group has received over $10.5 million in extramural grants to develop and study virtual internships and novel learning assessment tools, including a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the largest grant the agency has ever awarded for research on games-based learning.

Nephrotex is one of a number of epistemic games developed at UW by a group of investigators, researchers, and students led by David Williamson Shaffer, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and a learning scientist at WCER.

Shaffer says Nephrotex offers an alternative first-year program that models authentic engineering practices and motivates students, especially women and underrepresented minorities, to continue in the field of engineering. Although women make up an increasing portion of undergraduate students in the United States, their numbers in engineering are declining.

Designing the Simulation

The initial design, development, and testing of Nephrotex involved faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from the UW–Madison College of Engineering and the School of Education. Initial funding was provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation. To study its effectiveness, Nephrotex was offered as an elective module in a first-year engineering course. Data were gathered on (1) students’ perceptions of engineering careers and their motivation to persist in engineering, and (2) students’ discourse as they participated in the game.

Evaluators measured how students developed connections among the skills, knowledge, identity, and values of professional engineering practice. These measurements helped determine the extent to which students were designing and problem-solving in ways similar to a professional engineer.

A new assessment tool, Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), was developed by the Epistemic Games Group to measure learning and complex thinking in such settings. Standardized assessments measure whether a student possesses certain knowledge or skills. ENA, in contrast, assesses how students make connections between knowledge, skills, values, identity, and ways of making decisions. Measuring these connections provides a much more detailed and accurate representation of complex thinking. Complex thinking involves understanding how different elements of problem solving are connected, for example, which values to consider before taking a certain action, and what knowledge to gather before making a particular kind of decision. ENA measures not only learning outcomes but also the learning process, and indicates the extent to which students are learning to think like professionals.

According to Shaffer, research findings reveal that women who participate in Nephrotex show an increase in motivation to persist toward an engineering degree. After playing the game, one student said, “Starting the class I wasn't sure if engineering was right for me anymore, but finishing this internship I believe I could do well in a career in engineering and enjoy it.”

More about Nephrotex http://edgaps.org/gaps/projects/nephrotex/
More about Epistemic Games http://edgaps.org/gaps/about/epistemic-games-university-of-wisconsin-madison/
More about ENA http://edgaps.org/gaps/projects/epistemic-network-analysis/