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2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 121: Development of a Create-a-Lego-Engineer Activity to Examine Students’ Engineering Identity

Presented at Pre-College Engineering Education Division Poster Session

This paper describes the development of a Create-a-Lego-Engineer (CALE) activity which was created as an alternative to the Draw-a-Scientist (DAST) and Draw-an-Engineer Tests (DAET). While the DAST and DAET examine students’ (mis)conceptions of scientists and engineers, they provide limited information about whether students can envision themselves as scientists or engineers now or in the future. We drew from the Lego Serious Play (LSP) method which is grounded on the premise that hands-on learning results in a deeper understanding of the world and oneself in it. The LSP method is a process used to enhance innovation and business development, and it involves adults building metaphorical representations of their identity using Lego bricks. We adapted this process for use with elementary students (3rd-5th grade) in a specific context, namely students are asked to build themselves as engineers and a scene depicting what they would be doing as an engineer. Lego bricks were chosen as they are familiar to most students, are easy to use even without prior experience, and require no special skills or artistic abilities. The activity allows us to explore students’ creations of physical representations of themselves as engineers, including issues related to gender and physical characteristics (e.g., skin color, hair color and style), all of which students can customize using a variety of Lego options. Students are provided with a variety of Lego person pieces in order to try and build a representation of themselves using Legos. Additionally, a wide variety of Lego brick pieces were provided in order to allow for numerous ways in which students might represent engineers doing engineering work. Students were asked to imagine themselves as engineers and then to create their Lego engineer. Next, on a notecard, they described the type of work their Lego engineer would be doing, at which point they were then asked to create this scene using Lego bricks. Finally, after completing their creations, students reflected on the meaning of what they built and verbally described their creation and the choices they made. While these reflections provide additional insight into students’ beliefs about who can be an engineer and what engineers do, they also provide students an opportunity to imagine and see themselves in the role of an engineer. This activity was developed within the context of a multi-year, NSF-funded research project examining the dynamics between undergraduate outreach providers and elementary students to understand the impact of the program on students’ engineering identity and career aspirations. This paper will describe the development of the activity as well as preliminary findings from pilot testing and use with elementary students participating in the overall research project. Potential implications and limitations will be described.

Authors
  1. Dr. Kelli Paul Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2322-7542 Indiana University [biography]

    Dr. Kelli Paul is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University where her research focuses on the development of STEM interests, identity, and career aspirations in children and adolescents.

  2. Dr. Euisuk Sung Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7162-875X Indiana University [biography]

    Euisuk Sung is a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University. He earned a Ph.D. degree in Engineering and Technology Teacher Education at Purdue University. He has computer science degree and worked as a computer software developer for three years. then he served as an engineering and technology educator in high school for 9 years in South Korea. Currently he is working in NSF Funded project, titled TRAILS. His research interests are design cognition, maker education, computer science education, and all about STEM education.

  3. Dr. Adam V. Maltese Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8422-9395 Indiana University [biography]

    Professor of Science Education

  4. Ms. Karen Miel Orcid 16x16http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8460-4332 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

    Karen Miel's research focuses on PK-16 students' reasoning and decision-making in collaborative engineering design and the ways educators facilitate engineering sense-making.

  5. Dr. Merredith D. Portsmore Tufts University [biography]

    Dr. Merredith Portsmore is the Director for Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (www.ceeo.tufts.edu). Merredith received all four of her degrees from Tufts (B.A. English, B.S. Mechanical Engineering, M.A. Education, PhD in Engineering Education). Her research interests focus on how children engage in designing and constructing solutions to engineering design problems and evaluating students’ design artifacts. Her outreach work focuses on creating resources for K-12 educators to support engineering education in the classroom. She is also the founder of STOMP (stompnetwork.org), LEGOengineering.com (legoengineering.com), and the online Teacher Engineering Education Program (teep.tufts.edu).

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