2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Engineering education has made strides towards integrating social context into engineering problems. Real-world problems are one way educators have sought to contextualize technical problems; however, these problems are usually in capstone or design courses that students take later in their engineering coursework. Instead, students learn technical skills as abstracted from real-world applicability and later are challenged to reintegrate their technical skills within the physical, social, and economic environment. In this study, we seek to understand how students answer a real-world problem at the start of their academic engineering degree; specifically, students in this study are first-year engineering students who have completed one fall semester of their engineering degree. We have collected qualitative responses from 206 students in a survey administered at the start of their spring semester. Students were asked to lay out the process they would undergo to prepare for a natural disaster event in the problem. We collected qualitative student responses from two cohorts in 2019 and 2020. The findings show that while students focus primarily on the technical aspects of the problem, as apparent in the type of data they seek to collect, many include considerations on the people impacted, government interventions, and cultural values. This study sheds light on the ways that students answer a real-world problem before learning technical problem-solving techniques. The insights from this study will be used to supplement the introductory engineering curriculum, so students are better positioned to integrate social, economic, and political insights with their technical competencies in solving real-world problems.