 So I'm Donna Riley on the head of this School of Engineering Education, and it is my pleasure to introduce Morgan Hines. Morgan has a background in mechanical engineering. He got his bachelor's from Tufts University and then went on to get his PhD at Tufts in Engineering Education and his early, early career was marked by an NSF career award that really kind of defined his scholarship in the area of looking at how we broaden context in order to broaden participation in engineering. So what that means is really trying to reach a diverse group of learners both pre-college and in college by providing a broader range of contexts in which we talk about engineering. And he has a particular emphasis on design and evaluating maker spaces for doing that. He hails from Owlshead, Maine up on the New England coast and you can ask him about his competitive life in seat belt fastening. That one comes up way more often than I ever expected it to. It's a bottom line of my CVs posted somewhere I don't know where anymore, but students do talk about my safety belt fastening skills. I credit my mother who is an emergency room nurse. She made sure we knew how to put on her seat belts. But we're not going to talk about that right now. So thank you Donna. Thank you all for being here. Again, you probably weren't attending for me Sally. I don't know who they are attending for but someone in the room apparently. So yes, this is my work and it really came out of my focus on diversity around engineering. So in my work in the my PhD work I worked with the urban schools and suburban schools in Boston and kind of saw some issues around diversity around engineering and the diversity of people who engage in engineering. So one the diversity of people I think we all understand that you know the engineering classroom that I teach in first-year students is a lot of people looking like me and we could benefit from a more diverse group of people in those classrooms as engineers. Which can also lead to diversity of ideas and solutions that we get to approach for the big problems that we're facing as people and then also there's some misunderstanding I think in the general public of what engineers do. So I'll show you in a minute what that looks like. But whenever I talk about diversity, I have to address the elephant in the room and it's not because I went to Tufts University, which is the home of the Jumbos. It's because I check about about every box for the privileged identities you might have. So I won't go through them all. I happen to also be left-handed though. So I can maybe relate. I kind of poke fun at that. But you know I try and imagine myself as the opposite of those and what kind of impact that would have on my you know daily life and how I would navigate the engineering classroom, the engineering discipline. So I want to see a more diverse classroom. I want to see more diverse ideas in engineering. However if you go to think about what is engineering and especially like young kids they like to go to Google Images. I've learned. I have young kids as well. And so you type in engineer. This is like the first page of results. And then you scroll down. It looks pretty similar. Keep going. So you can see there's diversity, right? So hard hat color. You have yellow, orange, white, blue. But seriously not much there. You keep going. You can start to see some wrenches around the globe, which I'm not sure what that means. And some other disciplines maybe being introduced. And if for some reason you use Bing to do your internet searches. You can't. Literally this is like one of the first results and I couldn't pass it out. But again hard hat, blueprints and stuff like that. And I think in this room we all know and the speakers before me highlighted some of the diversity of what engineers do and it goes beyond building buildings and bridges and what's depicted in these things. And so obviously you see not much diversity of the people in those pictures. Those images or the ideas of the types of things they're doing and then what engineers do. So that is kind of what motivates me to do my work of broadening context, to broaden participation in engineering. And I try and integrate this into all my research, teaching and engagement. And I'll highlight some of those things. And so I always kind of put engagement with it because everything I do I feel like is engaging a certain outside audience, outside the typical audience. And I also want to acknowledge so the graduate students they have the privilege of having their images there and then the undergrads there were too many. So those are our wall of fame, the name tags as they pass through the lab working with me. So part of broadening the context is really having students come up with solutions to problems in their own life. So as opposed to always telling them we need to build a bridge from here to here that'll hold some weight which is a perfectly fine thing to do. But it doesn't give them the power or empower them to look at problems in their own lives. So I do this in a number of ways of having them just identify problems in their everyday life or so my undergraduate students have to design something for younger kids. Whoa, sorry about that. All right. And so hopefully I can figure out how to play this. So this was a girl who was participating in the PALS camp. So I do engagement through the PALS camp and she didn't like the basketball station they went to because the ball would always hit her on the head. So she started to design a device as you can see there that would help. I wouldn't test it with a real basketball. This is again a prototype. But she was able to design and then create this thing that would protect her head from errant basketball. So again, having students identify their own problems and then really start to understand what those problems are as opposed to us engaging them. And then also the diversity and the types of things they can do kind of highlights that engineering isn't just cars and trucks and buildings, et cetera. All right. And another approach I use is novel engineering. So using children's literature to introduce engineering to young kids. So as you read through a story, you can start to ask questions about what problems are the characters facing and then what are the attributes and characteristics of those characters that will tell you what they would want or not want. And it allows the students to really engage in the book and really start to understand with a little more detail like why this, you know, no this character would not want this solution because of this and this and this. And the teachers really like that the students are digging deeper into the book and then they get to do this engineering hands-on activity. So again, I love that it's empowering teachers, elementary teachers, who might not be as comfortable with the idea of engineering, but it's putting it into a context that is more comfortable for them. And so some of the part of the research is looking at how do we address how engineering doesn't always seem to, on the surface, match what students are interested in. So using some psychology, organizational psychology work around career theory, we look at the different types of interests one may have along realistic domains, investigative domains, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional. And engineering generally focuses on these realistic and investigative types of interests. And not so much on the artistic and social. However, younger students are going to have interests in those areas. And so doing, you know, a comparison of students who've participated in our types of engineering, broad context engineering activities, we start to see a difference in that they start to see that engineering is much more social than they had originally thought based on it being realistic or investigative, which is kind of the prototypical way of thinking of engineering. So again, it's about both shifting kind of perceptions of what engineering is and maybe engaging new and different interests among young children so that they, you know, can choose whether they want to do engineering or not. I don't want to have everyone go into engineering. I don't think it's for everyone. However, I don't want them to discount it because they hear something else that isn't quite accurate. And so how I then translate this to my teaching and engagement as well. So I teach a lot of the first year engineering courses here at Purdue, Engineering 131 and 132. And so I always have my students as their final design project designed for some real clients, real people outside of the classroom. And so I've done, I've partnered with the Miller Lab School on campus. They teach the infants to five year olds. And so they will have to design educational toys or activities for them. So there's some really cool things that they've done. And then they go test it out with the young kids. And what I like about that is it has them have to step outside of their own comfort zone of designing something for them. They have to design something for someone that's maybe different for them. And their number one issue is they create a game or activity that has a lot of rules and text. And forget that a three year old might not be able to read. And so they learn some quick things on the fly. And I've also partnered with the Wabash Center in Lafayette. They serve people, adults with developmental disabilities. And so they also develop some cool toys and activities for them. This guy was the star of the show when they came and checked out all the different things that the students made for them. This was a cool way of having someone be able to express emotions that they might not be able to say or speak. And so they had a shirt that they could point to different things that they were struggling with at the moment. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about my future. I think I have another minute first. I'll be going to San Diego for the next semester. So I just wanted to make you all jealous for one quick second. And then really it's about empowering others to kind of do this sort of work. So I'm happy to do this. I can deal with the ambiguity of how to take one student's crazy idea and help them implement it as a solution. But how do I empower others to do that? So how to take this idea of maker space kind of educational environments and make sure that it's not just being turned into a space where we have a 3D printer and then we can all make keychains. So it's very common. And so actually back to this idea of how do I integrate broadening the context. So one way, and I think a gentleman asked someone else about how do you deal with family life balance, is that I have co-authored and done research projects with my wife. So she's an interior designer and she designs schools and all schools that are being built now want a maker space. And then you ask them what for, what are you gonna do in that? They're like, we have no idea. We just want the coolest one that's ever been built now. And so she comes to me asking how do we create a space that empowers the teachers and the students to be creative and become makers. And so I like to think about it's not about keychains. It's not about engraving your name on something. It's about taking an idea and using the tools and materials you have and creating something. So how do we empower the teacher to stand in front of the room and say this is what we're gonna do and then kind of give the power over to the students and deal with all the issues that come along with that. Because there's a lot of guiding students away from or toward better ideas or more feasible ideas in the classroom context. And then beyond that, it's also about kind of influencing administration or other people to make that change more broad. So I know Meng had to step out, but he came, I think it was his first day of work at Purdue. He came to the her pals engineering workshop. And so I just wanted to highlight that. But really, how do we have people recognize that it doesn't have to be a strict curriculum that everyone does A, B, C, D, E. But that there is freedom, especially in engineering, to kind of have your own pathways through engineering, starting from pre-kindergarten, all the way up through college. And so my kids also get to participate in these engineering activities. My daughter, who's seven now, always asks, when are we going back to pals in the summer to do our creative crafting, is what she calls it, but I like to call it engineering. So that's, I can sell it to other people as engineering, not her yet, but so that's all I have. Thank you, I'm happy to take questions. All right, I've got the mic, I will come to you, questions. So I wonder if you could talk, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about bringing ethics into engineering and kind of emphasizing that a little bit more as part of the curriculum and kind of what tools and resources you try to make available to people so they can make good decisions as they go throughout their career. Right, so thinking about ethics, so and that's actually one of the kind of ways of broadening the conversation because oftentimes you can think of a technical solution and it's great, but then if you're not really thinking about the human element and so a lot of my work in introducing young kids and then the freshman here at Purdue is thinking about how do we consider the more human elements of an engineering process. So for example, in the first year engineering courses, I do so self driving cars are becoming, they're out there now, when I started this, they weren't out there as prevalent, but to start to think about the ethics behind that and the ethical decision making you have to make as an engineer of if you're presented with a scenario where there is going to be an accident, what do you program your car to do? Do you program it to protect the driver as much as possible or to protect the human life outside of the car as much as possible? And so there's no right answer necessarily to some of these questions when you have ethical kind of considerations to come up with. And so it really has, I think people think deeply and philosophically and hopefully outside of a technical dimension they have to think about history and sociology and other things as they integrate knowledge beyond math and science into an engineering decision. So ultimately that's what I want all students to see is that yes, math and science are going to always play a role in engineering design and decision making, but how do we make sure that other elements such as ethics and other topics integrate into our decisions so that they're as strong as possible? Hi, Morgan. I want to make sure that we ask this of all of our participants, but you mentioned your partner has a faculty career, you mentioned you have two small kids. How do you manage two faculty careers and two small kids? So this might be outing something, but my wife is no longer a faculty member at Purdue, but she's still an interior designer working for an architecture firm and she's actually traveling as we speak, she's out of the state. And so really, for me, it's about prioritizing my family. And so yes, sometimes I will drop something, you know, off at, you know, not do something for work and prioritize that. And however, I think I feel like once I had kids, it turned I learned how to be more efficient in different ways. So like, instead of just, you know, checking email for maybe an hour or two, you know, too long, it just was like, let's get through it. Let's, you know, on to the next thing. So I think it's about being efficient for me, but that's just how I've managed it. It really, I still treat my job as kind of a nine to five. Obviously, there's always things, emails from students I have to respond to outside of those hours by trying to focus my work then. My family life is outside of that and do the best I can. And I'm not perfect. Who is? Yes. Hi, I'm Jessica. We've never met before. My question is about your work and our work in general. Some people see it as soft engineering. How do we work to change that language? So I like the, so there's the soft sciences and hard sciences that a lot of people talk about. And I like to say that the hard sciences are actually the easy sciences because there are kind of predetermined answers often, at least in the kind of school curriculum, whereas the soft sciences, you're dealing with humans for the most part. And humans are extremely fickle. They are not predictable. I go into a classroom with 20 students thinking something's going to go this way and it does never go that way. And so it is about being creative and more thoughtful in your kind of research design because you know things aren't going to go the way they plant, you always plan. So to me, you know, not just to, you know, I'm not trying to say that I'm doing the harder work or the more difficult work, but I found my transition from engineering. I worked as an engineer for three years into research with human subjects. Was it was challenging and many new and different ways. All right, one more time for one more. Hi, I was just wondering how you decide on which issues to attack because there are so many human factors in engineering and anything you deal with. Yes, of course. So what what do I choose to attack? And ultimately, I try and push that off to the student, right? In the young students I work with, I want them to tackle what they think is important. And so in the backdrop to me, I have ideas of where I could, you know, lead them, but ultimately, I guess, again, back to the diversity. You know, that's kind of the theme that drives my work. So that's where I start, but then hopefully the students get to take their own paths once we get started. One more. Thank you for sharing your work. It's actually quite interesting, but initially you were in engineering. You were in engineering. How did you decide that I want to go and change my domain and help the students learn engineering the other way? And what were the initial challenges you faced? Right, so so I would say I'm still I like to say I'm an engineer when it's it benefits me and then I'm not an engineer. If it doesn't benefit me, I like to wear whatever had is the most appropriate at the time. So I'd say I'm still an engineer, but I did. My PhD was in an education program, an engineering education program. So I still have engineering work and human subject work. So to me, if you look at like human factors, engineering, I think there's a lot of overlap between what I do and what human factors engineers do as well in designing spaces, like educational maker spaces. There's a lot of like actual design element, but then the kind of human. How do humans interact and learn in that space? So for me, it was more of a as I was working as a mechanical engineer, I missed an opportunity to connect and really integrate design with people. And it happened is probably the nature of the jobs I had. But then seeing the opportunity to engineering education program at Tufts, which is where I went to undergrad helped me kind of bring all those worlds together. So I'm still an engineer and I like to educate people.