Preparing empathetic engineers via an empathy-oriented smart manufacturing curriculum

University Of South Carolina At Columbia, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by engaging engineering students in an empathy-oriented smart manufacturing curriculum and thereby fostering empathetic engineers who are well-prepared for the Industry 4.0 era. Future engineers need to not only prioritize the effectiveness of their solutions but also embrace empathy to develop user-centric designs and products that truly cater to user needs. This project aims to cultivate future engineers equipped with empathy skills to effectively anticipate, sense, and respond to users’ needs and concerns in real-world problem-solving scenarios. An engaged learning experience will be provided to engineering students through embedding empathy-oriented curricular units in the Future Factory platform, a small-scale smart manufacturing environment, and by integrating design thinking approach and active learning strategies. The outcome of this project will contribute to the vision of fostering world-class smart manufacturing workforce that excels in leading digital transformation into smart manufacturing. The overarching goal of this project is to design, develop, and implement an empathy-oriented smart manufacturing curriculum, evaluate its effectiveness for preparing empathetic engineers, and provide design guidelines for the scale-up of empathy-oriented curricula in engineering education. Following an evidence-based approach, a multidisciplinary team of educators, researchers, and engineers will co-design smart manufacturing curricular units. Those curricular units will focus on creating opportunities for students to approach real-world manufacturing problems from a human-centered perspective. To determine the effectiveness of the curriculum, this project will apply a concurrent mixed methods design, collecting and analyzing complementary quantitative and qualitative data. For quantitative data, questionnaires will be used to assess college students’ level of empathy and engagement in the curriculum. For qualitative data, semi-structured interviews will be conducted to gauge college students’ perception of empathy and elicit deeper understanding of student learning that may have been missed in quantitative data. The findings from two sources of data will be converged to formulate a comprehensive understanding of student experience in this empathy-oriented smart manufacturing curriculum. The findings of the project will enhance the understanding of empathy-oriented design in engineering education and provide practical implications on broadening student participation in the smart manufacturing workforce and education. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.