Spatial visualization of 3D objects based upon 2D drawings is a fundamental skill for engineers, contractors, and architects, and a lack of spatial visualization skills has been shown to result in lower scores in math, science, and engineering courses as well as lower persistence to graduation. Although BIM (Building Information Modelling) technology has grown in adoption throughout the AEC (Architect, Engineering, and Construction) industry, 2D drawings are still a fundamental deliverable that require correct interpretation for accurate construction. Most universities introduce AutoCAD in their lower-level classes to teach 2D drawings in their AEC curriculum, and then include 3D visualization courses in their upper-level classes. Students, however, still find difficulty interpreting 2D lines in AutoCAD as 3D objects, especially when they have poor spatial visualization skills. In addition, students often do not know why they are taught to use different line types when drafting, such as what the difference between a solid and dashed line from a 2D drawing represents in the physical structure. This work-in-progress project is testing a custom plugin developed in AutoCAD to help undergraduates improve their spatial visualization ability, by facilitating the connection between 2D sketches and 3D objects. This custom AutoCAD plugin has been developed that allows students to self-verify their 2D drawings by checking the 3D versions of what they have drafted. Students could then engage in what-if scenarios to visualize what would be the interpretation of 2D objects in a 3D space by changing their drawings and the properties of the assigned line types. As a pilot test of this plugin, this study will collect feedback on the usability and training tutorial for the plugin from students who are enrolled in AutoCAD classes in the construction science and management program in a large, Hispanic Serving Institution in the South-Central United States. This pilot study is guiding the refinement of the plugin tutorial so that the full test of the plugin's efficacy on students' spatial visualization skills can run smoothly. To get this feedback on the tutorial, students enrolled in an AutoCAD course will watch the tutorial video in class and then try out the plugin's features during an in-class exercise. Clarifying questions from the students will be noted as areas to improve upon. Further, students will be asked to complete a survey after the exercise for their feedback and suggestions. The instructor will also be interviewed for the same. This paper will present details about the AutoCAD plugin, the tutorial video, and results from the pilot study.

Early engineering courses at large universities enroll hundreds of students, and as of now are taught in an in person, hybrid, or online setting. These large classroom size, as well as impersonal nature of the current safe teaching methods, makes it difficult for instructors to provide meaningful feedback on assignments that students complete. This lack of feedback has an effect on the development of early engineering skills that students develop, including the free-body diagrams (FBD). Even before the shift in current instruction methods, there was a growing concern amongst engineering educators that student's ability to idealize real world situations into these FBDs has been under-developed. Most existing homework methods do not provide students with impactful feedback on FBDs that may be draw during the solution of a problem, if any feedback is provided at all. Because of this concern, a Sketch-recognition based tutoring system called Mechanix has been developed by the Sketch Recognition Lab at Texas A&M specifically to provide real time tutoring in drawing Truss Systems. The application provides a drawing surface for students to hand-draw solutions as part of the submission process, as if they were submitting a problem through a pen-and-paper submission method. AI algorithms working in the background of the application identify the shape of the drawn FBD, the perceived internal definition of the shape, and any additional features added to the sketch. These algorithms then determine if the user inputs for the assignment are correct and will provide real time iterative feedback as to why a user's input may be incorrect. Results of past usage of Mechanix has shown positive results in increasing engagement in struggling students, while also be as effective as other traditional homework methods for teaching statics and dynamics concepts. This paper focuses on the current effect of Mechanix on instruction across the 5 universities involved in the study in pre and post Covid-19 instruction methods. The study uses a range of instruments to gauge student understanding through concept inventories, select homework assignments, exam grades, and specialized problem sets given to students to determine the impact of the application when compared to traditional homework methods already used by the participating schools.

This study seeks to understand the origin accounts of academic makerspaces targeted for engineering students at higher education institutions, as described from the perspective of those who played a formative role in the development of the university’s makerspace. The origin accounts of eight varied university makerspaces are investigated for their practices (or shared strategies) in the formation of a university makerspace. This study implements a semi-structured interview protocol focused on the topics of administration, access, design, and aspects unique to the makerspace. Nine leaders from eight U.S. university makerspaces participated in this study. The interview data were analysed through multiple cycles of coding, and four major themes emerged: a need allowed for a want (and vice versa), access allowed for varied learning opportunities, direction allowed for empowerment, and experimentation allowed for sustainability. To supplement the four major themes, this article presents makerspace profiles and summaries of how each space started along with a comparison chart that reports the type of institution, funding sources, access, and management models. Through juxtaposing the makerspace profiles with the emergent themes, this article provides transferrable insights regarding operational practices for academic makerspaces.

The construction industry is inherently a riskier workplace than the average office job. The high-risk activities, such as work at elevation, often in complex and dynamic environments, tend to create more injuries and fatal accidents. According to the 2018 fatalities report from Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), forty percent of the total fatal hazards were related to falling. Many different safety training programs have been developed to reduce this risk. In addition to OSHA oversight, numerous initiatives from academia, insurance companies, and others in the construction industry have developed assorted computer programs and training modules to decrease fall accidents. In recent years, gamification in safety education using technologies have been introduced to enhance active learning as well. It is essential to use these tools only when they provide value. This study is examining efforts made to create safety training games, both in virtual reality and phone/tablet-based applications, to see what the gaps in these attempts are. This work in progress is part of a process to evaluate the effectiveness of existing and any potential new developments in this area for construction safety education. Industry leaders on the Construction Advisory Board at Texas State University have told researchers that fall prevention is their major construction safety concern, and so the scope of this investigation is on the training for fall prevention. In this preliminary phase, the most traditional method of fall prevention training, the classroom lecture, was evaluated for baseline efficacy. Having a baseline value allows for future comparisons of efficacy of various game-based methods. Students in the Construction Safety class took the OSHA fall prevention questionnaire at the start of the Spring 2021 semester to determine their preexisting knowledge in this area, received instruction in via a standard lecture, and then took the questionnaire again to measure learning gains. The pre- and post- instruction questionnaires also allow investigation as to fall prevention topics that remain challenging for students to learn/remember. Future work will include student testing of existing computer games and a pilot VR game experience that incorporates the findings of this initial phase.

This paper reports on findings from a group of ten teachers who were enrolled in a semester-long, graduate-level educational technology course that used design-based learning to explore the integration of making and the engineering design process into a variety of K-12 educational contexts. Using convergent mixed methods, this study examines how the course impacted teachers' familiarity and confidence in teaching the engineering design process, as viewed through their pre- and post-semester engineering design self-efficacy scores and their weekly reflective journal entries. These measures are important factors for developing teacher experience and confidence in integrating engineering and design-based learning strategies within K-12 educational contexts. Statistically significant results include increased confidence in design and decreased anxiety toward design. Findings illustrate how participants acknowledged increased familiarity and confidence in teaching the engineering design process, including their increased ability to make connections to the engineering design process, maker tools, and techniques. Implications for teacher education programs are discussed.

University makerspaces have been touted as a possible avenue for improving student learning, engagement, retention, and creativity. As their popularity has increased worldwide, so has the amount of research investigating their establishment, management, and uses. There have, however, been very few studies that use empirical data to evaluate how these spaces are impacting the people using them. This study of three university makerspaces measures engineering design (ED) self-efficacy and how it is correlated with involvement in the makerspaces, along with student demographics. The three university makerspaces include a relatively new makerspace at a Hispanic-serving university in the southwestern US, makerspaces at an eastern liberal arts university with an engineering program that has been created within the last decade, and a makerspace at a large, research university in the southeast often considered to be one of the top programs in the US. Students at all three universities are surveyed to determine their involvement in their university's makerspace and how they perceive their own abilities in engineering design. The findings presented in this paper show a positive correlation between engineering design self-efficacy (EDSE) and involvement in academic makerspaces. Correlations are also seen between certain demographic factors and the percentage of students who choose to use the academic makerspace available to them. These findings provide crucial empirical evidence to the community on the self-efficacy of students who use makerspaces and provide support for universities to continue making these spaces available to their students.

A four-year study meant to analyze the effects of a modified introductory engineering course on two-year retention of women and minorities was conducted at Texas State University. Introduction to Engineering modules were integrated into a general freshman university seminar course. Two experimental tactics were followed. One section type, Early Career Intervention (ECI), focused on giving students resources and contacts such as faculty, student leaders, and industry professional contacts that they could utilize to succeed in their degree plan and later on, their career. The other experimental section type, Design Intervention, included a small design project and introduction to design theory, as well as Early Career Intervention. This work-in-progress sought to discover early data trends that indicate success of the modified introductory class. Early data suggests that Engineering Technology (ET) students may prefer Design Intervention, and Engineering (ENGR) students may prefer ECI. Furthermore, under-represented minorities (URMs) in ENGR majors may prefer Design Intervention, women in ET majors seem to succeed after Design Intervention, and women in ENGR are retained by ECI. Further investigation of these trends is scheduled upon completion of data acquisition.

Introductory engineering courses at large universities often number over a hundred students, while online classes can have even larger enrollments, significantly constraining instructors’ ability to provide feedback on homework, including the free-body diagrams (FBDs). Most online homework systems do not provide feedback on FBDs if the systems even allow the submission, and instructors often lack time or resources to provide this. A few systems have been developed that use a menu-based system allowing students to creative FBDs. There is a growing concern amongst engineering educators that student lacks critical sketching skills and the ability to idealize a real-world system as a free body diagram (FBD). A sketch-recognition based tutoring system, Mechanix, allows learners to hand-draw solutions just as they would with pencil and paper, while also providing iterative real-time personalized feedback. Sketch recognition algorithms use artificial intelligence to identify the shapes, their relationships, and other features of the sketched student drawing. Other AI algorithms then determine if and why a student’s work is incorrect, enabling the tutoring system to return immediate and iterative personalized feedback facilitating student learning that is otherwise not possible in large classes. Preliminary results using Mechanix, a sketch-based statics tutoring system built at Texas A&M University suggest that a sketch-based tutoring system increases homework motivation in struggling students and is as effective as paper-and-pencil-based homework for teaching method of joints truss analysis. The current project implements Mechanix at five different universities obtaining Pre/Post Concept Inventory, homework, and exam scores. It is compared against either the university's current online system or paper-based homework. Focus groups provide further insight into the students’ perceptions about the impact of Mechanix on their learning.

Large class sizes in engineering programs often prevent instructors from providing detailed and meaningful feedback to students on their homework problems. While the literature shows that frequent and immediate formative feedback has several benefits in terms of knowledge gain and academic motivation, several instructors struggle to provide any feedback. Motivated by this inability, a sketch-based virtual tutoring system, named Mechanix, has been developed and implemented. Mechanix lets the students to sketch their freebody diagram on a virtual interface and the process involved is very close to using a pencil and paper. The system provides real-time feedback on the accuracy of their Freebody diagrams and the solution to the problem. This paper reports the implementation of Mechanix at two large public universities in the United States – Georgia Institute of Technology and Texas State University. Mechanix is used to solve specific assignments from each school that involve the use of freebody diagrams. Pre- and post- concept inventories are used to measure the improvements in the conceptual understanding of the students. The results show that students who solve their homework using Mechanix outperform their peers who do not in one school, whereas the results are similar across the two groups in the second school. The evaluation of the concept inventories shows that the students who used Mechanix has the same level of improvement in their conceptual knowledge compared to the control group.

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Introductory engineering courses within large universities often have annual enrollments exceeding several hundreds of students, while online classes have even larger enrollments. It is challenging to achieve differentiated instruction in classrooms with class sizes and student diversity of such great magnitude. In such classes, professors assess whether students have mastered a concept through multiple-choice questions, marking answers as right or wrong with little feedback, or using online text-only systems. However, in these scenarios the feedback is of a mostly binary nature (right or wrong) with limited constructive feedback to scaffold learning. A growing concern among engineering educators is that students are losing both the critical skill of sketched diagrams and the ability to take a real system and reduce it to an accurate but simplified free-body diagram (FBD). A sketch-recognition based tutoring system, called Mechanix, allows students to hand-draw solutions just as they would with pencil and paper, while also providing iterative real-time personalized feedback. Sketch recognition algorithms use artificial intelligence to identify the shapes, their relationships, and other features of the sketched student drawing. Other AI algorithms then determine if and why a student’s work is incorrect, enabling the tutoring system to return immediate and iterative personalized feedback facilitating student learning that is otherwise not possible in large classes. To observe the effectiveness of this system, it has been implemented into various courses at three universities, with two additional universities planning to use the system within the next year. Student knowledge is measured using Concept Inventories based in both Physics and Statics, common exam questions, and assignments turned in for class. Preliminary results using Mechanix, a sketch-based statics tutoring system built at Texas A&M University, suggest that a sketch-based tutoring system increases homework motivation in struggling students and is as effective as paper-and-pencil-based homework for teaching method of joints truss analysis. In focus groups, students believed the system enhanced their learning and increased engagement. Keywords: sketch recognition; intelligent user interfaces; physics education; engineering education

University makerspaces are growing increasingly in vogue, especially in Colleges of Engineering, but there is little empirical evidence in the literature that these spaces impact the students. Speculations have been made about these spaces creating a community of practice, improving retention, improving design skills and self-efficacy, teaching manufacturing skills, improving creativity, and providing many other benefits, but this has not been empirically documented. This paper compares student engineering design self-efficacy (i.e., confidence, motivation, expectation of success, and anxiety toward conducting engineering design) to reported usage rates from a makerspace at a large Hispanic-serving university in the Southwestern United States. Not all users of these spaces were engineering students, and as such, responses were examined through the context of student major as well as differences in gender, race/ethnicity, or first-generation college student status. Design self-efficacy is critical because when individuals have high self-efficacy for particular skills they tend to seek more opportunities to apply those skills, and show more perseverance in the face of set-backs. Thus, self-efficacy is often a good predictor of achievement. The results from one year of data at the Hispanic-serving university indicate that female and first-generation college students have significantly lower engineering design self-efficacy scores. The data also shows that being a user of the makerspace correlates to a higher confidence, motivation, and expectation of success toward engineering design. Initial data from two additional schools are also consistent with these same results. These results indicate that, for all students, regardless of race/ethnicity and/or first generation status, being a frequent user of a university-serving makerspace likely positively impacts confidence, motivation, and expectation of success toward engineering design.

Research shows that high spatial ability is linked to success and persistence in STEM. Empirical investigations often report a gender gap in favor of male students. The purpose of this research study was to assess changes to 9th grade engineering students' spatial visualization skills through engagement in a nine-week collaborative 3-D printed prosthetics project embedded within their existing ''Beginning Concepts of Engineering'' course curriculum. Using concurrent mixed methods, this study examined pre-/post-test scores on the Revised Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations (Revised PSVT:R) in connection with gender, course grades, and level of involvement in the project. Both male and female students' spatial visualization skills improved overall through the project. Higher levels of project involvement had a positive correlation with students' Revised PSVT:R scores, and semester course grades. Female students had lower Revised PSVT:R scores than their male peers before and after the project; however, females experienced statistically significant gains in their post-project Revised PSVT:R scores. The trend of the closing gender gap that is evidenced by the female and male students' mean scores suggests that a novel collaborative project, which includes hands-on, spatially-rich activities, can help female students catch up on their spatial visualization and mental rotation skills. This impact is increased when students dedicate more time to the project.

The revision of the junior-level Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing course (_______) was driven by three forces: ABET, keeping current on an ever-changing software program, and fostering classroom discussion. At an ABET outcomes annual review, the consensus opinion was that the students could effectively design but they needed more practice to better recognize the concepts of engineering design theory. This weakness led to a push for students to practice more with designing and design theory before their senior design courses. Traditionally, _________ lectured on design theory, fundamentals of CAD/CAM systems, and CNC code generation by CAD/CAM software using a combined class/lab time. The Mastercam software is important for preparing students for industry, but was taking significant classroom time and resources. The revised course pedagogy is a hybrid flipped classroom environment to shift instruction of software use out of the classroom, but the instructor did not have the time or recourses to create and continually update video content on how to use Mastercam. Instead, the instructor assigned an “e-text” (SolidProfesor account) for the course. The videos from the e-text are assigned to be watched before coming to class for that topic. During class the instructor does a short overview, leads discussion, and then the students work on the lab. Previously, a significant portion of the lab and class time was devoted to lecturing on software use. This change in pedagogy has allowed more time for in-class discussion and in-class design exercises. As well, the change in presentation style has resulted in more rapid understanding of Mastercam, as evidenced by the semester week in which the class completes the labs. The use of the e-text has also assisted the instructor with keeping class content up-to-date for each new version of the software without having to personally create new videos. The effectiveness of the addition time spent on design theory was assessed with the beginning of semester and end of semester engineering design self-efficacy survey instrument. This instrument was administered to determine if the course and time spent on design had an effect on the students’ engineering design self-efficacy.

Background: The constructs of interest and motivation are often identified as factors that contribute to the persistence of undergraduate college women in physics, mathematics, engineering, engineering technology, and computer science. A review of the literature regarding interest development and motivation as related to women as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learners in diverse communities is presented. The goal of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences women credited for influencing the development of their career interest goals and the sources of motivation they attribute to success in their academic course outcomes in their fields of study. Results: A mixed methods research approach was used to collect student perceptions related to interest and motivation by collecting data through the use of questionnaires and conducting focus groups. Results indicated that students identify early participation in STEM activities and family socializing behavior as ones that contributed the most towards influencing their interest in STEM and motivated them to persist in their studies and pathways as future STEM professionals. Conclusions: This study is unique in that the participant groups included a substantial representation of Latina and African American women's voices as relayed through the collected quantitative data as well as through the use of focus groups that encouraged women to freely identify experiences they felt contributed to their persistence success. These women identify interest development at various points in their lives as affected by family and school experiences, and family support was identified as having greater importance in their decision to persist.