Background Humanitarian engineering (HE) is rapidly emerging in universities and professional workplaces worldwide. In HE, socio‐technical thinking is fundamental as HE projects exist at the intersection of engineering and sustainable community development. However, the literature still lacks an understanding of the key features of socio‐technical thinking. Purpose/Hypothesis The purpose of this article is to investigate the key characteristics that distinguish the socio‐technical thinking of an expert from a novice in the context of HE projects. Design/Method We distributed the Energy Conversion Playground (ECP) design task to students starting their engineering degree (n = 26) and practitioners (n = 16). We iteratively and inductively analyzed the responses to develop a rubric characterizing the key features of expert socio‐technical thinking. We then scored participants' responses and compared them to identify differences between students and practitioners. Results The analysis showed that expert socio‐technical thinkers can provide high‐quality considerations across three domains: technology, people, and broader context. The comparison of the participants' scores showed that both students and practitioners scored highly in the technology domain. In contrast, students scored poorly in the people and broader contexts domains, identifying only simplistic considerations in these non‐technical areas, if at all. Conclusions This study provides novel insights into the development of socio‐technical thinking and further validates the ECP as a trustworthy measure of socio‐technical thinking. Implications for engineering educators and multiple lines of future research are also discussed.

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Co-design is fundamental to humanitarian engineering and increasingly recognised as such in engineering curricula. However, it is challenging to teach, learn, and assess. In this paper we describe the development and validation of a scenario-based instrument to distinguish novice and expert approaches to codesign in the context of humanitarian engineering. The instrument assesses the extent to which respondents describe stakeholder participation in each of the scope, design, and deliver phases of the design process, with co-design experts taking a collaborative approach throughout. We analyse and compare responses to the instrument from first-year undergraduate engineering students and experienced humanitarian engineering practitioners. Implications for educators, to use this scenario-based assessment in their own research, teaching, and curriculum development, are discussed in detail.

in Melbourne. He has worked in 10 countries on 5 continents, and as a consultant and facilitator with UNESCO, Australian Volunteers International, Engineers without Borders, Scope Global, World Vision, and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority. He also has a regular radio segment as "Dr Scott", answering listeners' questions about science. Dr. Nick John Brown, Engineers Without Borders AustraliaNick Brown leads the research interests and activities of Engineers Without Borders Australia. Nick is responsible for the development and delivery of an innovative education and research program that creates, builds and disseminates new knowledge in Humanitarian Engineering. This program engages academics and students from Australia's leading universities to develop innovative solutions to humanitarian problems faced by communities both within Australia and overseas. These projects cover a range of topics, including designing prosthetic hands for less than $5, researching low cost building materials in Cambodia and developing ways to provide cooking fuel and stoves to refugees all around the world.

Lecturing as transformatively co-creating (5) Lecturing as enacting research Three themes of expanding awareness framed this hierarchy: interaction, student diversity, and lecture purpose. By extrapolating these themes downwards, a zeroth category was conjectured: Lecturing as reading.Implications for educators are discussed, along with potentially fruitful avenues of future research.

Advances in technology offer new opportunities for teaching. Many students engage with online videos that enable them to watch, and re-watch these support materials flexibly and at their own pace. In our large-enrolment introductory first-year physics unit, many students find the content very challenging. To support their learning, we have developed short videos of 4-7 minutes explaining concepts and providing demonstrations of the problem-solving process. Our study was originally designed to evaluate and compare the effect on conceptual understanding and self-efficacy of students engaging with two different types of videos: screencasts (e.g. Khan Academy style) and lightboard videos, where the teacher presents direct to the camera on a writable transparent board (the image is then inverted to be the right way round). Then COVID struck, and all our learning was moved online. Thus, in the second semester of the study, we only used screencasts, and focused our research on exploring the relationship between online engagement, self-efficacy and conceptual understanding of students. We found that students preferred lightboards, and that both semesters’ average survey scores on self-efficacy and conceptual understanding were generally stable or increased only slightly. This is at odds with other studies of similar cohorts. However, the small number of paired responses in our study meant that a self-selection bias may have skewed results. Scores on the conceptual understanding were weakly correlated with assessment performance, suggesting the presence of other contributing variables. Initial self-efficacy scores did not predict subsequent engagement. Instead, missing multiple early assessments was identified as a stronger predictor of failing to pass the subject.