Recent posts for Nephrotex: Professional Practice Simulations for Engaging, Education and Assessing Undergraduate Engineers

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.

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.

Women in Engineering in the News

There has been a lot in the news recently–not all of it good–about women in science and engineering in the US.

From Business Week:

Women often go missing from the 100-plus entrepreneurial competitions held annually in the U.S., where winners take home prizes ranging from cash and trophies to contacts that can lead to opportunities. In the GSEA’s 2010 contest, just 25 of the 145 competitors were women and the winners and runners-up were all male. Since 2007 only 13 percent of the event’s 117 finalists have been female.

From the US Council on Women and Girls:

Despite… gains in graduation rates, differences remain in the relative performance of female and male students at younger ages, with girls scoring higher than boys on reading assessments and lower on math assessments. These differences can be seen in the fields that women pursue in college; female students are less well represented than men in science and technology-related fields, which typically lead to higher paying occupations.

And Inside Higher Ed:

A study at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst comparing the behavior of female and male students in introductory calculus course sections taught by male and female instructors… found notable benefits for female students (and for male students as well, though to a lesser degree) to being taught by women — and may point to strategies that would keep more women in STEM fields. The idea behind the research is that certain strategies “inoculate” female students against the sense that they don’t belong or are not likely to succeed in math and science courses.

All of which makes the goals of the NephroTex project more important than ever–and perhaps suggests that the non-player characters in the game should be predominantly female.

Of course, that’s easy to do in a virtual environment, and points to one of the advantages of a simulated internship in shaping students’ attitudes towards STEM fields.

Professional Practice Simulations for Engaging, Educating, and Assessing Undergraduate Engineers

Chesler, N., Bagley, E., & Shaffer, D.W. (2010) Professional Practice Simulations for Engaging, Educating, and Assessing Undergraduate Engineers. Paper to be presented at the International Conference of Learning Sciences Engineering Workshop, Chicago, IL.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/engineering-workshop.pdf

A Virtual Hemodialyzer Design Project for First-Year Engineers

Chesler, N.C. Bagley, E., Breckenfeld, E., West, D. and Shaffer, D.W. (2010). A Virtual hemodialyzer design project for first-year engineers: An epistemic game approach. Proceedings of the ASME 2010 Summer Bioengineering Conference. Naples, FL, .
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/EF-Games-for-SBC-FINAL.pdf
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