Recent posts for Games
Use of Professional Practice Simulation in a First-Year Introduction Engineering Course
Chesler, N., D’Angelo, C., Arastoopour, G., and Shaffer, D.W. (2011). Use of Professional Practice Simulation in a First-Year Introduction Engineering Course. Paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Conference (ASEE), Vancouver, BC.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/Chesler_ASEE_2011.pdf
Girls Sweep Global Google Science Fair
Google holds an annual competition to give talented high school students around the world a chance to showcase their ideas about science. NPR reports that Google has just announced their 2011 science fair winners.
The three winners, beating out over 10,000 students in the competition, were all young women. Girls can do science and engineering at the highest level, but we know that somewhere along the way they get turned off (see Goodman’s Final Report of the Women’s Experiences in College Engineering).That’s one of the reasons we are excited about Nephrotex, an epistemic game that offers something different from the typical engineering education curriculum.
We are already seeing results that women who participate in Nephrotex understand what engineering is and have motivation to persist after completing the virtual internship.
STEM in Elementary Schools
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports about K-5 schools embracing STEM programs and how engineering in elementary schools is becoming a trend:
[There are] 40 STEM programs and schools across Minnesota. The STEM initiatives are spreading nationwide, spurred by an increased emphasis on science and math and pressure to fill a job market void with future engineers and science-savvy students.
This is one of the reasons why we built our virtual internship for freshmen undergraduate engineers. Go Nephrotex!
But of course, there are always critics…
The Center for American Progress cautioned that STEM programs aren’t all producing higher test scores.
Okay… but if you want to measure students’ critical thinking progression within STEM curriculum, standardized tests are not the way to go.
Underrepresented Minorities in Engineering
From an American Institutes for Research report:
“Research also suggests that the freshman year experience in particular is important to a student’s decision to persist with a degree program; hence, attrition rates are highest in the first semesters of coursework (Kramer, 2005). For students interested in a STEM career, this pattern may especially be the case. The freshman-year STEM curricula consists of demanding, largely lecture-based classes that essentially “weed out” students who may not have the potential to succeed in the scientific and technical fields (Cooney et al., 1990; Kramer, 2005). Critics of engineering education commonly agree that this weeding process impacts the retention rates of individuals who are disproportionately represented and that the field could benefit from providing introductory courses that are more interdisciplinary.”
This is one of the reasons why we launched our virtual internship, Nephrotex, in an undergraduate freshmen engineering course.
Where the jobs are
A recent report from the National Science Foundation shows that more and more, jobs are in science and engineering fields, which are growing at over 2% per year on average, while the rest of the workforce is growing at just over 1%. That gap is smaller in the last decade than at any time since the 1970s, but still quite substantial.
All the more reason to use games like Nephrotex and Land Science to encourage young people to consider technical careers….
