Most people don’t ask engineers to get in touch with their feelings, but Ashley Earle, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at York College of Pennsylvania, does.
When Dr. Earle arrived on campus five years ago, she heard about the need to revamp the Introduction to Engineering class. With a love of building things, she saw a chance not only to give the class a long overdue facelift but to touch every student who would ever pass through the Kinsley School of Engineering.
The opportunity arrived to do just that when Dr. Earle received a $10,000 grant as part of her fellowship with KEEN Engineering Unleashed, and organization dedicated to building entrepreneurial mindset in engineers.
Along with Dominic DelliCarpini, Ph.D., former Dean of the Center for Community Engagement, Dr. Earle recruited through The Honors Program the Engaged Scholars. The Scholars helped lead a group of engineering students, faculty, and alumni through the design thinking process, which uses empathy interviews, to revamp the course utilizing a human-centered approach.
They got to work during the 2024 Spring Semester. The original course had two six-week sections. The first focused on mechanical engineering and using the machine shop. The second highlighted electrical engineering and taught students such tasks as creating circuits.
Civil Engineering majors often felt left out, Dr. Earle says, as the class was designed before the major existed. The class also didn’t help students understand how engineering disciplines come together. The new course would uproot that structure.
Through the design thinking process, incorporating interviews with students across multiple disciplines, faculty, and alumni, the new course would help students learn to think like engineers and develop skills related to understanding clients’ needs, solving problems, and realizing why they chose engineering.
Kirsten Nelson ’27, a student who had recently completed the original course, saw opportunities to add to her educational experience. While she’d come to the College with a lot of engineering experience from robotics competitions and through being a mentee in a program for young women with STEM interests, she never had considered her greater calling as a Mechanical Engineering major.
“Engineering can provide me with opportunities, not just STEM-related, but networking and growth as a person,” she says. “I think we can get other first-year students excited about that through this course.”
Josh Smith, a 2023 Mechanical Engineering graduate, wanted to stay connected to his alma mater. When Dr. Earle asked him to participate in the project, he didn’t expect that he’d learn other skills as well.
The concept of empathy interviews, at the root of design thinking, taught Smith how to ask open-ended questions about people’s expectations for the course and what their hopes were when it came to embarking on their engineering education. Participants later took the responses from their interviews and worked through various ideations, with different points written on Post-It Notes. All of that work would lead to a newly designed course.
“I’d never heard of design thinking before,” Smith says. “Now I’m taking this concept into my career and I know I’ll find ways to use it to solve problems.”
The new course will launch with beta testing this fall, and it looks very different from what previous students might remember. The class asks students to build a mini-golf course and deal with the requests of clients who sponsor holes. For the first year, clubs on campus will serve as the clients. In December, the students will host an open house to show off the course to the campus and local York community. In future years, they hope to connect with local businesses and non-profits as clients to further strengthen the connections between the college and community.
“The course now incorporates so much creativity,” Dr. Earle says. “It lets students know there isn’t always one right way or best way to do things. Engineering requires communication, understanding, and open-mindedness. There are so many ways to expand this, and I’m pretty pumped.”
