It’s not every day an Elizabethtown College professor finds the opportunity to go to California and come back with more than stories and memories.

For associate professor of engineering Dr. Sara Atwood, her sabbatical research starting as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, turned into something she could bring to her engineering students at Etown: an engineering approach to societal issues.

While visiting at U.C. Berkeley, Atwood had the opportunity to visit Stanford University and work extensively with Dr. Sheri Sheppard, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford.

With Sheppard, Atwood began to explore the pathways of current engineering students, analyzing why some students stay while other students leave their programs, as well as the impact of internships. She also explored applying the engineering design process to real-world societal applications.

With a grant she wrote and submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) with Sheppard in February, Atwood has been able to apply her research in California to her students at Etown.

In California, Atwood analyzed first-generation students, their internship experiences and ways to continue to build students’ “engineering identities.”

Engineering students at Etown, along with their national counterparts, use a method called “design thinking” within their field.

This process, a culmination of creative thinking steps, allows engineering students to problem-solve with a deeper, nontechnical approach.

The design thinking process Atwood shared with her students is made up of three main sections: empathy, ideating and prototyping.

Using empathy allows students to truly understand their clients and the larger, dividing issues our societies face. Using ideating allows students to brainstorm all the possible solutions to a problem, continuously thinking of any ways to resolve the issue at hand. Using prototyping allows students to think through all the possible alternatives, circling back to earlier steps for more inspiration, if needed.

Design thinking allows engineering students to extend their technical way of problem-solving. With inspiration from Stanford’s design thinking program and Stanford’s d.school, Atwood brought this convergent and divergent way of thinking to the liberal arts environment at Etown.

Putting this program into practice, Atwood organized an event on the same day as the ENOUGH: Walkout and Vigil to also commemorate the victims of recent school shootings. Dealing with a large societal issue, Atwood challenged her students to use design thinking theories to problem-solve this national crisis. Approximately 70 Etown students participated in the event.

“I really learned to apply design thinking techniques to larger societal issues,” Atwood said.

Moving forward, Atwood would like to continue exploring design thinking with her students. She hopes to be able to hold problem-solving events like the one reflective of recent school shootings.

With a mostly positive student reception to design thinking and its applications, Atwood would like to involve more interdisciplinary people in this program and potentially even teach a course that allows students to practice this theory for credit.

As for Atwood’s research, she is continuing to keep up the collaboration with Stanford and their design thinking model.

This summer, Atwood will be travelling back to Stanford with several other Etown faculty to attend a design thinking workshop.

Atwood was also one of 12 applicants accepted nationally to a workshop at Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts to learn how to showcase design thinking in interdisciplinary venues.