High-school course on engineering design: Enhancement of students' motivation and development of systems thinking skills

A unique course named "Introduction to Engineering Design" has been recently developed and implemented at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. The course allows top 12th grade students who are majoring in science and engineering to experience engineering design. At the end of the course, the students plan and implement - on a team basis - a real-time control system for an electric motor. The course is intended to increase its graduates' motivation in science and engineering, develop their systems thinking skills and train them in teamwork, as such skills will assist them in their future engineering work. The study described in this paper examined - through quantitative and qualitative tools - to what degree the course's first two objectives had been attained. Thirty-two students participated in the study and its findings indicate an improvement in the students' intrinsic motivation to study science and engineering (medium effect size) and in their systems thinking skills (large effect size).