Self-efficacy applies at any age (“My week at Engineering camp”)

A few weeks ago I spent a few days in an intensive engineering education workshop related to making across the curriculum. Except for working multiple fast food jobs in my teens and in college (thank you Dairy Queen, Taco Tico, Subway, and Northwestern cafeteria!), the bulk of my professional work has been “on screen” rather than “hands on.”  While I’ve been working in Mechanical Engineering for over 3 years and am surrounded by colleagues who run impressive labs doing hands on research, my position is quite different than theirs.  I run faculty development/”train the trainer” workshops, conduct educational research & evaluation, and design online and hybrid courses. I can count on one hand the number of formal educational experiences I’ve had that required me to work in the physical world–like my high school shop class or college physics lab–rather than in a virtual space–building courses in learning management systems or analyzing data and creating reports. Like many of us, I hate feeling “stupid” (aka not knowing how to do something that everyone around me does). The benefit of my professional world is that I can typically make and correct mistakes without people knowing.  I can “preview” online courses, revise papers, and iterate presentations before I deliver them.  But in a makerspace, which is where we spent much of our week, it’s a lot more obvious if I pick up the wrong tool or mistake a laser cutter for a 3D printer!

Fortunately, things were very well designed and executed and while I was surrounded by engineers way more comfortable in these spaces than I was, I did get to design something in Tinkercad and hold the 3D printed output and got to work on various teams working on prototypes.  I didn’t necessarily know in the shop part of the lab which drill bit to use (or where to find them) or the best way to attach a rubber band to our prosthetic arm to ensure that it could hold a water bottle for 30 seconds.  But, I did actively participate and saw that my lower self efficacy in these spaces is largely due to  a lack of experience rather than any inherent limitations on my part.  In spite of my initial nervousness, I now have more confidence about my ability to work/play in these spaces.