This Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education (NUE) in Engineering program entitled, "NUE: Cross-disciplinary Education in Social & Ethical Aspects of Nanotechnology", at Arizona State University, under the direction of Dr. Thomas P. Seager, will develop a unique four weeks long workshop experience for undergraduate students that will explore the social and ethical issues raised by nanotechnology, build cross-disciplinary communicative competence, and enhance engineering leadership and teamwork skills. Three objectives will be achieved by adapting learning activities originally developed by the LEGO Group called Lego Serious Play (LSP, www.seriousplay.com), an open source, facilitated workshop method that allows for material deliberation. Participants in LSP workshops explore challenges related to an ongoing project, task, or strategy by building symbolic and metaphorical models of their insights in LEGO bricks and presenting them to each other. This workshop will address the difficult aspect of cross disciplinary communication in an interactive setting that plans to bring together science/engineering and social science majors.
This NUE program will directly provide training to a diverse cohort of faculty and undergraduate students, and a PhD student in the Herberger Institute of Design with expertise in LSP. It will advance the understanding of the processes by which students can acquire communicative competence outside their primary field of practice and enhance teamwork, leadership, and understanding of social issues in engineering students, while improving nanotechnology literacy in non-engineering students. The program will specially reach out to underrepresented groups within engineering. Lastly, the project will leverage technical work and products from a prior NUE award at ASU, produce and disseminate a series of two-minute videos that document the workshop experience from the undergraduate student experience, and produce a longer "Faculty Cross Talk" under the auspices of the ASU Office of Institutional Inclusion that documents the faculty experience, and provides source materials to other Universities seeking to replicate the successful aspects of the program's approach.
