With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this collaborative project aims to serve the national interest by improving undergraduate civil engineering education. Building on the team's prior successful work with a primitive mixed reality learning environment, the team plans to scale up the integration of traditional engineering classroom experiences with authentic virtual activities. Specifically, the project will integrate a mixed reality learning environment into a required civil engineering course on geotechnical engineering. The overall goal is to increase student motivation and engagement by providing real-life contexts for classroom learning. The geotechnical engineering course requires field visits in which the students apply what they learn in the classroom to real-life civil engineering problems. Thus, this course is especially suitable for testing the use of mixed reality in engineering education because it can simulate multiple civil engineering problems without exposing students to dangerous situations. The course and accompanying mixed-reality educational environment will be implemented at more than twenty universities, including Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. As a result, the project will test the effects of the mixed reality component and its accompanying curriculum with over 6,500 students. Through analysis of this approach for integrating mixed reality into curricula, the project has the potential to identify inclusive best practices for design and implementation of mixed reality learning experiences for diverse populations of learners.
The project specific aims include: (1) developing students' practical experience in the field, which is currently rare in traditional civil engineering curricula; (2) assessing engineering judgment, a critical competency for practicing engineers; and (3) increasing students' engagement and motivation by providing simulated field experiences. Grounded in the Self-Determination Theory of motivation, the project's mixed-methods research design will feature students, instructors, and institutions as critical informants. This comprehensive examination will increase understanding of the ways in which mixed reality learning environments can improve engineering education by enabling the creation of scalable, sustainable, rigorous, and intrinsically motivating teaching and learning activities for a diverse audience of instructors and students. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
