Promoting college student’s learning motivation and creativity through a STEM interdisciplinary PBL human-computer interaction system design and development course

Abstract

In recent years, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) has been extensively advocated and implemented in education, as it is suggested to be very impactful on student’s interdisciplinary learning, which can be seen as a significant driving force for a country’s advancement in scientific and technical knowledge, innovation, economy, and international competitiveness. Developing a human-computer interaction (HCI) system to solve real-world problems requires the inventors to have interdisciplinary STEM knowledge and skills. Thus a STEM Interdisciplinary Project-based Learning (IPBL) approach was applied to teach a total number of 45 college students registered in the departments of engineering and design. Inspired by Design Thinking, the 18-week STEM IPBL course was delivered through four phases, including discover, define, develop, and deliver. All the finished HCI projects applied the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills from the domains of STEM. Evidence drawn from the 6-point Likert ‘Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ)’ indicated that the STEM IPBL course was very impactful on student’s learning, which improved the participants’ (a) overall learning motivation (Pre M = 4.4, Post M = 4.64; p = .012), (b) self-efficacy of learning (Pre M = 4.03, Post M = 4.43; p = .003), (c) enjoyableness of learning STEM (Pre M = 4.68, Post M = 4.75; p = .556), and (d) recognizing the significance of learning STEM on future career development (Pre M = 4.73, Post M = 4.94; p = .077). It is also found that compared with design majored students, the course had a better effect on the engineering majored students. Evidence collected from ‘Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults (ATTA)’ indicated that the student’s overall creativity was significantly improved (Pre M = 63.36, Post M = 68.44; p = .000). More specifically, among the four facets of creativity, the improvements were as follows: fluency (Pre M = 14.89, Post M = 16.2; p = .001), elaboration (Pre M = 16.69, Post M = 18.62; p = .000), flexibility (Pre M = 14.82, Post M = 16.04; p = .009), and originality (Pre M = 16.96, Post M = 17.58; p = .136). It is found that the STEM IPBL course had a different impact on the student's originality, while the originality of engineering majored students significantly improved (p = .006), the originality of design majored students did not change. Some educational implications were also provided in the article.