Authors:

Hemisha Shardul Patel

Date Created:

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About Paper:

To support the growing semiconductor industry, the Purdue Ivy Tech Chips Program (PITCH) initiative helps develop high school students' problem-solving and teamwork skills through engineering design, preparing them as future STEM professionals to tackle global challenges. In this paper, we investigate how rising high school juniors and seniors collaborated and navigated a design challenge as part of the summer camp. Our study focuses on a subset of thirty students (six teams of five) who developed proof-of-concept projects addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using MicroBit microcontrollers. Employing a concurrent mixed methods approach, with a predominance of qualitative analysis, we examined student artifacts, think- aloud protocols, and structured interview excerpts to uncover the dynamics of team-based design decision- making processes. Our findings reveal that students actively broaden and acknowledge multiple perspectives and rely on data-driven decision-making. Notably, there was no significant correlation between meticulous documentation of the design process and the quality of the final projects. However, teams with members who experienced higher satisfaction and felt supported often produced better outcomes. These results suggest that interdisciplinary problem statements can nurture diverse interests and that a focus on presenting and exhibiting projects, rather than competing, promotes a cooperative and supportive team environment. Future research should explore the long-term impacts of these educational approaches and refine methods to better support STEM skill development in high school students. Keywords: Teamwork; Decision Making; High School Students; Engineering Education

Source:

Purdue University / 2024

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Co-authors:

Hemisha Shardul Patel