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This work-in-progress paper aims to document the process of incorporating open-ended modeling problems (OEMPs) into introductory undergraduate dynamics courses. Content in engineering science courses is historically challenging for students to understand and transfer to new, unfamiliar contexts. These challenges likely arise in part from pervasive traditional teaching methods that emphasize solving "textbook problems" which are not truly representative of the complex, ill-defined problems professional engineers usually engage. Subsequently and unsurprisingly, engineering education researchers and industry stakeholders alike have long lamented engineering graduates' inability to independently and creatively solve new problems. Practicing engineers exercise what Gainsburg (2007) identifies as engineering judgment to make assumptions, discretize elements, decide how to model qualitative factors, and evaluate the reasonableness of the end result stemming from these decisions. In most engineering classes, instructors (or the textbook) usually simplify systems so much that these activities are circumvented entirely. However, our research team has previously demonstrated how OEMPs, which ask students to apply mathematical models learned in class (e.g., rigid body acceleration analysis) to real-world systems, can inspire the productive beginnings of engineering judgment in undergraduate students. Our research team has primarily implemented and studied OEMPs in undergraduate introductory statics and mechanics of materials courses. For this current work, we formed a multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary faculty learning community with two engineering education researchers and four faculty members teaching dynamics. This paper documents the process of expanding on lessons learned from implementation of OEMPs in statics courses--as well as one instructor's experiences with OEMPs in a dynamics courses--to more fully investigate the transferability of OEMPs into undergraduate introductory dynamics courses at multiple institutions. This paper first describes our process for collaboratively creating new dynamics OEMPs based on formalizing guidelines and sharing lessons learned from statics OEMPs development. We discuss reflections from the faculty members about the value and challenges of designing a dynamics OEMP. We then describe how initial observational feedback was collected from undergraduates at multiple institutions who assessed the new OEMPs from a student perspective. Next, we present the OEMP assignments we created. The paper concludes by describing our plan for qualitatively analyzing interviews with students to understand how students engaged in the productive beginnings of engineering judgment while completing the dynamics OEMPs. Implications include insights on how students approach and solve complex, ill-defined problems, develop engineering judgment, and build mathematical models. This investigation also provides the future opportunity to compare how students engage in these activities across multiple engineering science courses, institutions (including Carnegie classifications), and engineering subdisciplines. Lastly, this work will help to advance our development of general guidelines for creating and scaffolding an OEMP in any discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering design has universally been identified as essential to the practice of engineering. As institutions of higher education seek to improve their undergraduate engineering programs, significant attention has been directed to how to develop and improve students' engineering design practices. This effort often starts in first-year courses as it is coupled with initiatives to retain students. This paper presents both the adaptation of an existing methodology to study design practices to accommodate an in-class design challenge and initial results from the implementation of that methodology to study groups of students in a first-year LEGO roboticsbased engineering course at Tufts University. Preliminary results show students engaged in limited problem scoping and information gathering. These results add to differing results about the practices of first-year engineering, suggesting that context may play a large role in how students invoke design practices. Results also indicate that the majority of time was spent in physical construction and management of group communication. The implications of both of these findings are discussed with respect to instructional design for first-year students along with directions for future research and methodology refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]