NSF Award
1432258
This collaborative project between Northern Illinois University, The Milwaukee School of Engineering, and Rutgers University intends to improve student learning in sophomore-level engineering dynamics. Engineering dynamics is a required topic for a large fraction of all engineering majors including mechanical, aerospace, biomechanical, and civil engineering. The material is challenging and many students struggle to master the important concepts encountered in this course. The project will utilize a virtual reality simulated environment to present interactive challenges that require application of engineering dynamics principles to solve. This interactive environment, called Spumone, was developed under previous NSF-sponsored projects. In pilot studies, use of Spumone by students has been shown to improve learning of engineering dynamics concepts. The current project will expand the use of this simulated environment to evaluate the effectiveness in a wider range of students. The primary purpose of the project is to take an educational simulation that was designed and tested in the classrooms of a single educator, and broaden its reach to the classrooms of other educators. In doing so, the investigators will discover which features of the simulation-based learning environment favor broader adoption, and which impose barriers. Lessons learned will enable even wider adoption of a promising intervention, designed for a critical sophomore-level engineering course that tens of thousands of students take each year. It is expected that lessons learned will be transferable to other efforts to build video-based STEM learning environments. <br/><br/>Using virtual reality and complex simulated environments has been shown to engage teens and young adults in problem-solving tasks that are often long, difficult, and require high level critical thinking skills. The degree of engagement produced by video simulations extends across all races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Some of these simulations are found to appeal to both males and females. The investigators working on this project have been developing simulated environments for use in teaching core mechanical engineering courses. In their studies, they found that students who learned in the simulated video environment, achieved higher scores on standard concept tests, compared to students who took the courses that did not employ simulations. Furthermore, students who learned with the simulation were more engaged, more motivated, and much more likely to pursue advanced studies in the same subject. A pivotal step in bringing simulation-based engineering education to a wider audience is that of making the simulation easy to adopt by other educators. In this project a group of potential adopters will work together to modify their courses to incorporate the simulation. At the same time the potential adopters will inform the simulation designers how to modify the application to best fit into their courses. In the process the project investigators will perform an educational test in which they determine if the gains in learning and student engagement achieved by the developer can be replicated by the new adopters. Evaluation of the project will provide information about the effectiveness of video-based STEM learning environments and the extent to which this simulation is easy to adopt by other educators. An implementation evaluation component will assess whether the project is being conducted as originally envisioned. A progress evaluation component will assess progress toward answering the design and research questions, as well as progress toward the goal of successfully implementing Spumone in the alternate settings. Summative evaluation will assess the overall success of the project in rigorously answering the design and research questions as well as assessment of the goal of implementing video-based STEM learning environments on a larger scale.
