The Tiktaalik Collection: Science in Transformation

This poster, first presented at the National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering Education workshop in Long Beach CA in Oct 2012, explains the necessity of developing engineering cognition, affection, and conation by completing the whole Kolb Learning Cycle. It emphasizes experience and reflection as essential, but overlooked, aspects engineering education with the potential to create transformation of the student.

This project is developing and testing a new approach to teaching engineering and science students that leverages their interest in experiment and experience. Unlike a traditional liberal arts pedagogy involving reading about ethics, discussing the readings, and writing new analyses, this pedagogy uses games to position students in a series of potentially adversarial relationships that force them to confront some of the salient problems of sustainability, including environmental externalities, the Tragedy of the Commons, weak vs. strong sustainability and intra-generational equity. Recent tests allow students at different universities to play the games simultaneously using information communication technologies (ICT). In each game, students must ask themselves the questions related to moral cognition , "What are my obligations to my fellow students?” and moral conation, “What am I willing to risk in my own sense of well-being to meet these obligations?" We hypothesize that this approach will result in students that are actively engaged in learning exercises, and result in an improved ability to identify ethical problems, pose potential solutions, and participate in group deliberations with regard to moral problems.

Topsy is an online analytical tool that evaluates millions of archived and real-time tweets based on their relevancy to a specific criterion. This report studies what Topsy considers relevant, how to create a relevant tweet, the accuracy of Topsy’s relevancy score and whether Topsy is an acceptable tool for use in gauging class participation. After thorough investigation, Topsy was determined to be a great analytical tool for monitoring Twitter participation, yet lacks the fundamental ability to distinguish between tweets relevant to coursework and tweets relevant to everything else.

While sustainability is increasingly recognized as an important ethical principle, teaching ethical reasoning skills appropriate for sustainability is problematic. Using non-cooperative game theory, we simulate problems of collective action where tension exists between individual interests and group benefit using grade points. Each of our ethics games brings students completely around the Kolb Learning cycle, which includes four stages:
       1. Abstract conceptualization.
       2. Active experimentation.
       3. Concrete experience.
       4. Reflective observation.
Our pedagogy is organized into game modules that start with a review of theory and relevant concepts in the form of assigned readings and lectures.