This week, CSNE Engineering Education Research Manager, Kristen Bergsman, won “Best Paper in Division” for the Design in Engineering Education division of the 2018 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her paper, “The ‘Structured’ Engineering Design Notebook: A New Tool for Design Thinking within a Studio Design Course,” was selected from five finalist papers out of a total of 52 papers accepted into the division.

The paper presented Bergsman’s research study of an engineering design notebook that she and CSNE University Education Manager, Lise Johnson, co-created and how the notebook was used by students in Johnson’s 2017 Neural Engineering Tech Studio class at the University of Washington.

“Lise and I collaborated on a re-design of her popular studio design course. One of the things that came out of our conversation, based on Lise’s experiences with previous iterations of her course, was a need for a tool to help engineering students learn to engage in engineering design, project management and design thinking and to support them in developing skills in documentation,” Bergsman said. “It is common practice for engineering students to be told to document their design processes in a blank notebook, but we felt that we could create a structured notebook—one with prompts, tasks, and design thinking tools—that would better support students’ design learning.”

The award came with a cash prize of $500. Johnson and Bergsman plan to publish the design notebook to make it widely available to engineering faculty and students. Bergsman also plans to submit the manuscript for publication in an engineering education research journal. The design notebook will be used for a third time when the class is next offered by the CSNE in Winter Quarter 2019. 

The CSNE was well-represented at the ASEE conference, with Bergsman presenting a second paper, co-authored with CSNE Executive Director and Education Director, Eric Chudler and Jill Weber from the Center for Research and Learning on a longitudinal program evaluation of the CSNE’s Research Experience for Teachers (RET) program.

Two RET participants, Juanita High School science teacher, Alexandra Pike, and Seattle Girls School science teacher, Phelana Pang, also presented in a pre-college engineering poster session about their classroom enactments of neural engineering curriculum units (view Pike’s paper here and Pang’s paper here). Additionally, Bergsman shared the CSNE’s teacher-authored curriculum units during a curriculum exchange session.

For more information about the CSNE’s participation in ASEE or Bergsman’s study, contact Kristen Bergsman.