Faculty from the Purdue University School of Engineering Education (ENE) will work with approximately 50 secondary school educators and 600 students in the U.S. to weave socially transformative approaches into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curriculums, preparing students with the tools and skills necessary to succeed in a rapidly and continuously changing world.

The four-year project, funded by $2.5M from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Discovery Research preK-12 applied research program, aims to improve student reasoning through conscientious design. Led by ENE Professor Şenay Purzer, the research team consists of ENE Associate Professor Muhsin Menekse; Director of Purdue’s Minority Engineering Program Virginia Booth-Womack; ENE alumna and University of Louisiana at Monroe Assistant Professor Jenny Quintana-Cifuentes; and Charles Xie, Founder of the Institute for Future Intelligence.

“For many academics and professionals, the traditional view of engineering embodies the application of science and math to problem solving,” said Purzer. “But in reality, scientific and engineering practices deal with complex trade-offs that require ethical integrity, reasoning fluency, multicultural ingenuity, and transformative agency-competencies that are important for conscientious citizenship and decision-making. Our goal is to promote student agency to design so they can take this ability to problem solve into any professional field they choose.”

The research team will work with secondary education teachers in school contexts that primarily serve students of color, and focus on net zero engineering design projects using Aladdin, an experimental, virtual platform developed by Xie and colleagues that fuses Computer-aided Design (CAD) and Computer-aided Engineering (CAE) to streamline engineering design in the fields of renewable energy and energy efficiency.

“The integrated CAD/CAE platform can be used to design a structure and simulate its function within a single system, allowing a smooth introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) to enable new design methodologies,” Xie said. “We will leverage Aladdin’s generative design features to help participants explore the solution space more thoroughly as they deliberate the ambiguous and ethical consequences (future impacts, fairness, etc.) of their design choices.”

Examples of engineering projects include building a self-sustaining microgrid neighborhood or solarizing a school building that must take into consideration cultural elements including sacred plants and a fishpond in the vicinity of the project sites.

Students will they gather data, scope and analyze complex problems, generate ideas and solutions, and make arguments based on their conscientious negotiation of the design’s risks and benefits. The research team will study how the students develop reasoning fluency, transformative agency, and STEM knowledge through socially conscientious design.