Kelly Scarff
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The Problem Statement is a collaborative assignment that helps students approach writing as a problem-solving tool, incorporate discipline-specific language in their writing, and identify safety or accessibility issues in their community. In teams of three, students identify a safety or accessibility problem on campus or in the local community, and then propose a discipline-specific solution to solve or ameliorate the problem. This assignment was designed specifically for mechanical engineering students in junior standing; however, it can be easily adapted for a wider student population. To do so, I suggest keeping the safety/accessibility problem theme and replacing the engineering solution with one more appropriate for the students’ academic major. For instance, if a student is an economics major, they would focus on a safety/accessibility problem that can be ameliorated with a solution steeped in economics. The same goes for English students, sociology students, biology students, mathematics students, and so on. If you maintain the collaborative nature of the assignment, you may want to group students together who have a shared major, although this is not required. One benefit of this assignment is that it prioritizes writing as a problem-solving tool, so one does not need to have an engineering (or economics, sociology, biology, etc.) background to teach this assignment but rather a command on writing and communication. While the solution is based on the discipline-specific knowledge that students have accrued up until this point in their college career, the overall goal is for them to practice communicating that knowledge clearly and effectively through writing.