CSTEPS: Collaborative Support Tools for Engineering Problem Solving
The goal of this project is to develop tools to support the collaborative sketch activities of undergraduate engineering students. In collaboration with faculty and students in the College of Engineering, we are conducting a design based project to design and study tools that provide the students with the ability to create shared representations during their collaborative activity, and play back their work, to support refelction within the group or in whole-class presentations.
Initial research focused on the current collaborative practices of the students during their typical class activities. Results indicate that the quality of their collaborations is low, and groups showed little change over a four-week period. This data was used to inform the design of our software. The first implementation focused on differences in collaboration between groups working on 1) individual tablets, 2) synced tablets and 3) multi-touch tables. The second implementation will focus on how play-back tools are used by the students and teaching assistants (instructors).
Project Team
Emma Mericer (PI)
Joshua Peschel (coPI)
Geoffrey Herman (coPI)
Greg Fabry
Jimmy Canning
Lu Lawrence
Meghan Kessler
Saad Shehab
Susan Kelly
Taylor Tucker
In the News
September 22, 2015
College of Education opens new digital learning research laboratory
The College of Education will host an event Sept. 30 to debut a new research laboratory that enables scholars to study learner interactions with digital technologies in real time while collecting massive amounts of varied data.
Funding
The project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program (Award Number: 1441149).
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1441149&HistoricalAwards=false
Publications & Conferences
Shehab, S., & Mercier, E. (2017). Designing engineering tasks for collaborative problem solving. In B. K. Smith, M. Borge, E. Mercier, & K. Y. Lim (Eds.), Making a Difference—Prioritizing Equity and Access in CSCL: The 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Philadelphia: The International Society of the Learning Sciences.
Mercier, E., Ferguson, L., Kessler, M., & Shehab, S. (2016, April) The Emergence of Collaborative Practices during a Month of Engineering Problem Solving Activities. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC.
Mercier, E., Shehab, S.,Sun, J. & Capell, N. (2015) The development of collaborative practices in introductory engineering courses. To appear in the proceedings of CSCL 2015.