This project provides support for Exploring Advanced Placement Opportunities in Engineering: A Workshop on Designing a Universal, Exchangeable and Transferable (DUET) Credit, to be held at the University of Maryland College Park (UMD) in the Spring of 2016. The overall goal is to contribute to the development of a secondary-school level course in design that would expose students interested in engineering and architecture to the design process. The workshop will explore issues and barriers associated with realizing this goal. Follow-on to the workshop will be a series of interviews to calibrate the issues and barriers against the experience of practitioners and policy makers. The workshop would initiate research that could ultimately open the credit doorways for expertise earned across formal and informal design activities covering a range of programs from PLTW to Maker Spaces. Creating an equivalency process for design across learning and practice settings (e.g. engineering, education, architecture) has the potential to broaden the diversity of students, encouraging them to take the first steps towards understanding and practicing design; and to receive recognition. Aligning the pathways for credit to be earned and universally accepted, in the context of the formal and informal learning environments available for design, would open many academic and career pathways for all students, teachers and practitioners.

This workshop will create a unique opportunity for leaders from the education, engineering, workforce and policy communities to convene and share ideas on how to achieve universal acceptance of earned credits for the introductory study of design. The workshop will draw approximately fifty participants from six different sectors: K-12, community colleges, four-year institutions of higher education, industry and not-for-profits, government and policy, and non-government funders and foundations affected and impacted by a transferable credit for design that have applied design thinking within their occupations. The proposed one-and-a-half-day workshop will be organized and conducted by UMD in collaboration with Morgan State University and followed up by individual interviews documenting 1) core design Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSAs) for a universally accepted credit for design; 2) identification of the critical pathways and barriers within these pathways for a universally accepted credit for design; and 3) use of Logic Modeling to organize the findings.

Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2015-10-01
Budget End
2017-09-30
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2015
Total Cost
$287,842
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Maryland College Park
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
College Park
State
MD
Country
United States
Zip Code
20742