RealEngineering: Space – Designing the Community-Applied Space Engineering Program

Engineering education is still largely offered through traditional, content-heavy approaches, with key technical topics in individual courses separate from those that emphasize the practice of the engineering profession, resulting in fragmented student workloads. Traditional assessments do not accommodate students’ unique, diverse learning perspectives. These issues fail to recognize that engineering is above all else a community-of-practice, requiring practitioners to demonstrate innovation and resilience to address today’s complex challenges in sustainable ways. More recent programs adopt project-based pedagogies, that engage learners in engineering problems that affect their communities. This paper proposes taking the project focus further, with a structure that allows faculty and students to collaborate on real-world engineering work that is not just done for, but also with, the community, and with sustainability built in. Such an approach establishes an overarching connection between the “work” of an engineer and what it is to be a future engineer for society. The authors are developing a 4-year space engineering program proposal, where students from all years will collaborate to design, build, launch and operate a cubesat for, and with, the community as the full focus of their 4-year degree. A six-week pilot slice of the program took place in the summer of 2021 with 20 students from all undergraduate year groups collaborating on a community-focussed, sustainable small space-mission design activity to change power dynamics around water quality data in northern and indigenous Canadian communities. Students worked in organizational teams, with structured teambuilding and collaboration time, focussed working sessions from subject-matter-experts, microcredential learning and unstructured team time to advance their project. This culminated in a mission concept review with a team of expert, industry and community partners. This paper presents some of the key ideas that informed the program, and the tools used to frame the learning journey in an undergraduate engineering degree. The pilot demonstrated students’ readiness to take on complex, unstructured challenges and organize themselves, and the potential to offer undergraduate learning spaces that have a very different connection to community and global issues.