AUTHOR=DeWaters Jan , Kotla Bhavana TITLE=Using an open-ended socio-technical design challenge for entrepreneurship education in a first-year engineering course JOURNAL=Frontiers in Education VOLUME=8 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2023.1198161 DOI=10.3389/feduc.2023.1198161 ISSN=2504-284X ABSTRACT=
Engineering graduates must be prepared with sound technical knowledge and a range of 21st century competencies and professional skills such as creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, and innovation to successfully solve today’s complex, global problems. Equally important is a deep appreciation of the degree to which technological solutions are situated within the context of human and natural environments. Despite calls from the National Academy of Engineering and several professional organizations to broaden engineering education to embrace these skills, most engineering programs persistently focus on the importance of technical skills. This paper describes an open-ended team-based design challenge that integrates entrepreneurial-minded (EM) skill development into an interdisciplinary first-year engineering course that approaches engineering from a socio-technical perspective. The challenge was implemented in two simultaneous first-year classes (