Exciting Students About Materials Science And Engineering: A Project Based, Service Learning Museum Design Course

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Chen, Katherine C.
Copyright Year	2007
Abstract	A new course was developed for Materials Engineering students to design, create, and install interactive, educational displays on Materials Science & Engineering for a science museum at a local K-6 charter school. The course grew out of an ASM Foundation grant “to excite young people in materials, science, and engineering careers,” and the challenge was put forth to Cal Poly students. A formal design sequence was applied to give the students the opportunity to learn about the design process, project management, and teamwork. User profiles were created for the stakeholders, and project values were established. The class partnered with the museum curator to develop functional and design requirements for the displays, and to gain valuable feedback during the project development. Guest lectures and discussions with museum exhibit developers, education specialists, and design experts assisted the class. Three different displays that highlighted materials were developed: “Metallic Trampoline” (amorphous metal), “Smart Materials” (NiTi shape memory alloys), and “Touch and See” (heat sensing liquid crystals). The final museum displays were well received by the client and end users. A survey at the end of the quarter revealed that the engineering students gained valuable design and project experiences. A partnership with the SciTechatorium develops This projects class grew out of the Cal Poly Materials Engineering department outreach efforts 1 and the desire to connect more with the community. The relationship between Cal Poly and the Bellvue Santa-Fe Charter School in Avila, CA was initiated through a colleague whose children attend the school. The SciTechatorium 2 (Figure 1a) is a 1900 square foot “hands on” science museum and discovery room that houses a plethora of science demonstrations, exhibits, reptiles, insects, etc (Figure 1b), and is quite a gem in the central California area. The SciTechatorium essentially houses all the show-and-tell items and treasures of Mr. Chick Fidel, a retired high school physics teacher who now acts as the part-time museum curator. a) b) Figure 1. a) The SciTechatorium at the Bellvue Santa-Fe K-6 Charter school in Avila, CA houses b) numerous demos and items that promote scientific inquiry for all ages. The SciTechatorium is open for a few hours per week (depending on docent volunteers), and is available to the K-6 students during recess and lunch. The children can come in and spend as much (or little) time as they wish to take out the reptiles, use the computers, look at displays, talk to Chick and the docents, and play with any of the numerous interactive items at the museum. The museum is an amazingly fun and inviting place, where the learning is not necessarily at the forefront for the students and is effectively covert. Chick's great enthusiasm for the wonders of science spreads to the kids and their parents by means of the museum. The school science teachers may also use the place to illustrate science principles as part of their lesson plans. The SciTechatorium also seemed like a wonderful place to highlight Materials Science & Engineering (MS&E) to young people. The student coordinator of our outreach program was pers귭 to write a proposal to the ASM Foundation Student Chapter Grants program 3 “to excite young people in materials, science, and engineering careers.” Our grant was funded to purchase demos and build displays that highlighted MS&E for the SciTechatorium. However while the funding and the enthusiasm for the project was present, reality of college students is such that priority goes to classes, and extra curricular projects sometimes fall by the wayside. Thus, a brand new course was developed – “Design of Educational Museum Displays in Materials Engineering.” A new course is developed to incorporate service learning and design The primary goal of the course was to establish a relationship with a local partner or organization where Cal Poly students could use their engineering skills towards a project to benefit the community. Objectives included learning and implementing a usercentered design methodology, gaining experience in project management, and improving communication skills. The inspiration to structure a course around the designing and building of educational museum displays was inspired by similar innovative class activities by Crone 4 and Pruitt 5 . MATE X424 was offered in the Fall of 2006, and was a 2-unit activity (i.e., cross between a lecture and laboratory type class). The class met for 4 hours a week, and much of the class time was devoted to actually working on the displays. The small class size of 6 students allowed us to truly work together as a team. Due to the service learning component of the course, the students were now working for their client, Chick Fidel and the school children. The instructor functioned more as the project manager, rather than the judge that determines their grades (although that task still existed). The first half of the quarter was spent on brainstorming and going through a formal design process. Instead of immediately jumping to a design solution, we started out by trying to gain as much information on a variety of topics for several weeks. Reading articles on science museums 6,7,8 were assigned and discussed in class. Different “consultants” – such as a professor in the College of Education that specialized in K-12 science and an engineering professor with experience in design – visited our class to answer questions and to offer their input. We also took a class field trip to visit three Bay Area museums: The Exploratorium 9 , The Tech Museum 10 , and the Lawrence Hall of Science 11 . At each museum, we got the chance to experience different types and approaches of displays, and we also talked to professional exhibit developers. Listening to the Client with User Profiles One of the very first class activities was to develop user profiles or personas of our intended customers. The class identified the stakeholders and discussed the client needs. The class then came up with 3 imaginary students (and 1 parent) that might attend the school and developed their user profiles. Sitting around a table, each person was encouraged to contribute to the personas, which resulted in colorful and multidimensional user profiles. Different ages, gender, and personality types were covered. The user names, personalities, likes and dislikes, and reactions to school, were generated collectively and drawn on large Post-it notes (Figure 2). The engineering students really enjoyed this particular activity because they got to be creative and it was a departure from their usual classes. We kept the user profiles posted on the wall to continuously remind us that these projects were not meant for us, but our clients. It was very useful for the instructor to respond to students' ideas by referring them back to certain user profiles, and asking them if their design features would be appropriate to the users or if their design catered to only one type of user. A student wrote on the end of the quarter survey * about the user profiles: Building of the user profiles was key to learning what our target users wanted in a product, which also dictated the entire design phase. If we ever got stuck, it was always nice to refer back to the user profiles for ideas. Figure 2. User profiles or personas were developed to understand the end users' needs and to consider how the children would interact with the museum display designs. * Note that all student comments are in italics throughout the paper. Another early activity involved the students each writing down as many ideas as possible on the features of what their museum displays should be like (e.g., colorful, interactive) on 2"x2" Post-it notes. They then shared their ideas with each other and grouped them into themes onto the larger Post-it sheet (Figure 3). Overarching themes were developed from these groupings, and these themes became the basis for the project functional and design requirements. The project goals naturally resulted from this team brainstorming session. Input from the client and consultants also helped shape the project goals. Again, the project goals and requirements were kept posted on the wall for easy and continual reference. Figure 3. The class demonstrated great teamwork in developing goals, functional and design requirements. The functional and design requirements guided the brainstorming and project selection sessions for the museum displays. Some of the major requirements were: inspires scientific thought or inquiry provides a discrepant event or surprising incident that asks “why?” must be interactive, fun incorporates different senses be colorful and appealing showcases Materials Science & Engineering is memorable, something to talk about later with family is social, can experience or share with friends does not have too many words or technical words is simple to grasp main concept (but could be multi-leveled for different audiences), doesn't rely on long explanations has low maintenance (since things that don't work are very frustrating and leave a bad impression) is safe Pitching the ideas to museum curator and school principal The service learning aspect of the course allowed the students to develop their communication skills. One of the course objectives was to interact with the community, and the class visited the school to talk to the clients (Chick, docents, and the school children). They also observed how the young children interacted with the existing museum displays. The students later had to communicate with outside vendors and companies while building their displays. The class also realized that Chick should be heavily involved with the design process and not just at the very end. Chick had terrific ideas and great insight into children's responses. He also stressed the importance of safety, maintenance, and the possibility of unintended uses of museum displa
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