First Year Civil and Architectural Engineering Student Project

Many engineering students lack confidence during the ideation phase of their senior project experience. Tasks associated with developing the project scope and alternatives, while considering diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and sustainability pose challenges. Faculty hypothesized that these challenges are associated with lack of prior experience in developing a comprehensive collaborative proposal. An improvement of the preliminary senior project proposal is desired and is hypothesized that improvements can be achieved by introducing educational strategies earlier in the curriculum. This paper evaluates a first-year civil and architectural engineering project that prepares students for upper-level work while introducing them to stakeholders. The project is addressing a need identified by a city in their Sustainability Action Plan (SAP). The need is mobility by way of improving public transit and non-motorized transportation networks. Mobility hubs are suggested in SAP. The City identified key design features and priorities such as: comfortable waiting area for all users, micro- and macro mobility, low impact developments for storm water management, sustainability and DEI. This project implemented multiple learning strategies. First the students engaged with city planners and community survey data obtained by city. Guest speakers shared the design and engineering considerations that went into the conceptual design of a regional multi-modal transit center. Later in the semester, the students are introduced to engineering terminologies and concepts such as analysis of transportation data and relevant geometric designs, team work, sustainability, environmental justice data, low impact development techniques for stormwater management, building systems, and conceptual cost analysis. The semester concludes with the students working in teams to prepare the conceptual project and the deliverables are; preliminary project plan, impact statement, and a final proposal presentation. The student's learning will be assessed using student developed mind maps that captures their vision of the transit center meeting the needs of the stakeholders. The knowledge structure of the mind maps is evaluated to categorize the student's learning as non-learning, surface-learning and deep-learning. The quantitative assessment of the mind map is based on the number of concepts included, addition and removal of links between concepts, and the addition or removal of concepts between mind maps. Three sets of mind maps are developed and assessed. The first mind map is developed by the individual students after the initial project proposal has been submitted and evaluated by faculty. Immediately following this activity, the team collaborate to developed a mind map that reflects the collective vision. The last mind map is developed, by the individual student, after the project impact statement has been developed and graded and immediately before the final project presentation. The project is currently underway. The last and third set of mind maps will be developed by mid December 2023. The study hypotheses are that: 1. The individual student mind maps become increasing more complex between the first and last mind map demonstrating deep learning. 2. The team mind maps are more complex than the first individual mind map demonstrating surface-learning and deep-learning.