Student Innovations Related to COVID-19: The International Engineering Design Challenge

At the start of 2020, online education experienced a significant increase as educators attempted to mitigate a total stop to learning, fearing their students might lose a critical year of their educational experience. This rise in e-learning, affected by school closures, challenged educators to develop meaningful and timely learning experiences that were accessible and realizable for all their students while at the same time consider diverse digital equity issues affecting full participation. Their drive to increase the learning potentials of their students was a testimony to teachers’ commitment to the students they serve. It also highlighted educators’ sense of responsibility for the academic and social well-being of their students, many of which were negotiating new learning environments at home. This paper describes student involvement in the COVID-19 Engineering Design Challenge, an international Phenomenon-based Learning (PhBL) project developed to provide students in primary, secondary, and higher education learning environments with an opportunity to think about and reflect on challenges surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and to develop and share their STEM solutions globally.


Introduction
In late December 2019, a new strand of the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV-2) challenged the world [1]. At the writing of this paper, over 4 million people worldwide have reportedly died from COVID-19 [2]. "The sudden and unprecedented shuttering of our nation's school buildings due to the COVID-19 pandemic forced educators to face the most jarring and rapid change of perhaps any profession in history. Within a moment's notice, teachers were asked to leave their classrooms indefinitely and, in many cases, to recreate a learning environment that is 100 percent virtual" [3].
Children around the world spent more time online than ever before. Nearly 1.5 billion children in 173 countries were affected by school closures in 2020 [4].
As schools began to close and classes were quickly moved into online environments during the first few months of 2020, teacher stress elevated, teacher morale dropped significantly, and student engagement decreased [3]. Many teachers and teacher educators rushed to place course content online for their students in response to immediate school closures, while at the same time searching for quality activities for their students to engage in during their rapid and time-consuming transition to online teaching and learning.
Teachers wanted their students to engage in more than random activities; they sought relevant and engaging projects focusing on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects that would naturally encourage their students to be creative, innovative, and learn more about the situation affecting their communities as well as others across the globe.
The University of Texas at Tyler University Academy (http:// www.uttua.org/), a system of K-12 STEM Lab Schools located on three separate campuses in East Texas (USA), engaged in a initiated by Finland's education system in 2016 which strives to expand typical Project-based Learning (PBL) and Problembased Learning (PrBL) approaches into learning experiences that immerse students deeper into contextual situations aligned with real-life issues, while also applying knowledge and skills from multiple disciplines. PhBL involves students in inquiry approaches such as the 5E Model (an instructional model encompassing five distinct phases: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate), and encouraging students to share their innovative ideas and designs widely.

What is the COVID-19 Student Engineering Design Challenge?
The COVID-19 Engineering Design Challenge provides students of all ages (primary, secondary, and higher education) with a platform to identify and design solutions to issues and world-wide problems related to the pandemic. Students are encouraged to identify areas of need, create and design solutions to the challenges they identify, and communicate their ideas/ solutions to their classmates, families, and community members via online environments or following physical distancing guidelines established by their teachers and/or schools. Teachers were provided with Leadership Certificates and a Student Participation Certificate template to personalize for each of their students (see Figure 1). Impact data were gathered from participating teachers after projects were completed through a simple Qualtrics survey. Survey questions included prompts to share teacher contact information, their location (country), and information about their school type.
Teachers were also asked to report the subject(s) they teach, the grade level of their students, the number of participating students as well as the gender of their students. Teachers were also asked to provide the number of student projects created along with the names of the projects. If teachers were interested in sharing their students' work, they were invited to upload projects to the survey, or provide them via Google Drive or email. Finally, teachers were asked to describe how their students presented the results of their projects (whether students shared their projects through classroom presentations, online venues, etc.), and describe the audience for the presentations.

Covid-19 Engineering Design Challenge Results
Nearly 400 students from 9 countries participated in the 2020 Challenge. These students, from Argentina, China, the Dominican Republic, England, Japan, Peru, Russia, Turkey, and the U.S., ranged from primary, secondary and university environments. Almost half of the participating students were girls. Sample classroom implementation activities included online discussions and brainstorming sessions; student created PowerPoint presentations; individual and group projects that included student hand-drawn designs as well as designs created with the assistance of online technology tools; the building or constructing of models; writing community service announcements; and also detailed research reports submitted by university students.
Projects ranged from designing masks that recycle exhalation "so that you don't have to continuously smell your bad breath" to recyclable face masks to help solve the problem of single-use masks that are washing up on shorelines and littering the seabed, as well as innovative sterile mask collection bins. Other innovations included designs for temperature scanning systems to be used before entering buildings, creating city designs that included recovery communities for those infected, and designs for treadmill systems programmed to monitor your health (including COVID testing) that include virtual tours such as visiting a museum as well as tours to popular locations around the city to "keep you healthy while you can't visit the gym and for when you are tired of staying at home" (in the words of the student inventors).
In addition, many students designed technology innovations such as robots programmed to roam buildings providing hand sanitizer while also cleaning and sterilizing the floor as they move from room to room. For more information about how to involve your students, see https://uttyler.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eXILiS0zOZ2pAnb/.