Effect of Evolving Design Requirements on Students' Motivation

In 2008, XX University was awarded a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant (Award No. 0806735), known as Scholars of Excellence in Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) which provided scholarship funding for academically talented students having financial need. Since then, the grant has been funded twice more in 2011 (Award No. 1153250) and 2016 (Award No. 1643869); the current award period started in 2017 and will run until 2021. As a requirement for the SEECS program, all students must participate in a community-based design project, undertaken for a non-profit entity in the local region. This project is nominally a two-year effort, though some projects have taken longer to complete. Recently, a couple of the projects have experienced several significant setbacks due the decommitment of the original sponsor of the project, change of the project location, and significant change of the scope of the design. The current study presents the evolution of different parameters such as students' enthusiasm, motivation, perception of values and group dynamics at different stages of the projects among five groups of SEECS students. The data was collected through student satisfaction surveys, which are administered to all SEECS students each semester. The results indicated that for the projects with no or minimal change in the design requirements, almost every parameter showed increasing behavior until the completion of the project. On the other hand, all parameters showed decreasing behavior during the time that the project was proceeding for the two projects with significant change of requirements. In addition, SEECS alumni have been surveyed as to their perception of the change of requirements and how (if at all) those changes mirror their working experiences. The paper will present summary results of those surveys.