Engineering Commons^™

Writing Children’S Stories To Improve Engineering Student’S Communication With Non-Engineering Audiences, Benjamin D. Mcpheron, Katelyn J. Butler

ASEE IL-IN Section Conference

One of the biggest challenges for students in science and engineering is communicating technical information to a non-technical audience. Students may struggle because they are not adept writers, because they cannot divorce the ideas from the jargon, or because they simply don't understand the material well enough to explain it to someone else. To attempt to address this issue, this study proposes the use of children’s stories to help students practice writing for a target, non-technical audience. To measure the efficacy of this method, junior level engineering students in an electronics course in Fall 2018 were asked to write children’s …