Global Engineering Design Symposium: Engaging the Sociocultural Dimensions of Engineering Problem Solving

Global service-learning continues to gain prominence in many engineering schools. At Purdue University, for example, three main programs offer students global engineering project experience in the context of international development, namely Engineers Without Borders (EWB), Global Design Teams (GDTs), and Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS). Participating students work to create technical solutions to address community needs, either for academic credit or as an extracurricular activity. Students involved with such projects typically have ready access to the technical resources and expertise needed to carry out their work, including support from participating faculty and staff. However, preparing students for the non-technical aspects of their projects is often more difficult since it requires that they learn how to identify and grapple with the kinds of social, cultural, and political considerations that frequently emerge when working on real-world problems in developing contexts. To address these challenges, Purdue's Global Engineering Program (GEP) organized Global Engineering Design Symposium (GEDS) events in 2012 and 2013. Each half-day symposia attracted more than 90 students, faculty, and staff, and featured presentations, panels, and interactive exercises covering topics such as global competency, transdisciplinary teamwork, human-centered design, and stakeholder/needs analysis. This paper offers a detailed description of symposia. We also report preand post-event assessment data from participating students, including: 1) demographics, 2) results from Political and Social Involvement Scale (PSIS) survey questions, 3) Cultural Intelligence (CQ), 4) quantitative evaluation scores for all major event components, and 5) qualitative results from three open-ended event evaluation questions. The major goals of this paper include: characterizing the engineering students who opt into these kinds of programs, providing faculty and staff at other institutions with inspiration and guidance for organizing similar kinds of training opportunities, and exploring strategies for systematically assessing the effectiveness of such events. This work is important as part of ongoing efforts to explore how engineering curricula can be expanded to address a wider range of technical, professional, and global competencies, while allowing students and faculty to make a positive change in the world. In summary, the events were viewed very favorably by most students, with many specifically noting the value of hearing about specific stories and cases from the speakers and being challenged to think about what it means to identify and address community needs in different cultural contexts. Additionally, we find considerable evidence of self-selection factors among students participating in these programs and events.